


The Incident of the Fellow in the Fellow's Garden

by Azdak



Category: Lord Peter Wimsey - Dorothy L. Sayers, The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-07
Updated: 2013-12-07
Packaged: 2018-01-03 21:49:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 28,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1073454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azdak/pseuds/Azdak
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lord Peter visits an old friend at Cambridge and finds himself caught up in shady dealings as the worlds of academia and espionage collide.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. ON THE PLAYING FIELD

An illustrated version of this story is available at: http://www.englishanddrama.at/FannishStuff/wimseyfic/

 

_Cambridge, June 1955_

  
"Dash it, Duffers," said Lord Peter Wimsey, gazing petulantly across the verdant green of Christ's College playing field, "you drag me out here to the desolate wastes, or at any rate to the fens, which is much the same thing, on the promise of a cricketing extravaganza, and what do I find? That you have spoken with forked tongue. I just hope your May Ball does a better job of living up to its reputation."

"You're getting impatient in your old age," returned Sir John Duffield placidly. He had only recently been elected Master of Christ's and was still overflowing with pride at the achievements of his new demesne. Indeed, it was bidding fair to rival Balliol in his estimation, although he knew that Wimsey could hardly be expected to agree. "Henderson just had a bad innings, that's all. It could happen to anyone. Just you wait a bit."

"I am waiting," grumbled Wimsey. "Patience on a monument, that's me, smiling at mediocrity. Look, that fellow's out too, what's his name? Carruthers? Mind you, the bowler's a bit of a demon, I'll give you that."

"St John's finest," said Duffield. "But he won't keep it up, he's got no staying power. Fancy another glass of something?"

"No thanks," said Lord Peter, refusing to be mollified. "Can't stand Pimm's, makes me feel sticky all afternoon. I say, who's the chap who's just come on? He's got one hell of a cross-stroke."

"That," said Sir John smugly, "is our latest sporting acquisition, one Illya Kuryakin. And believe it or not, before this year he'd never played cricket in his life."

"No?" said Wimsey disbelievingly. "What is he, some kind of Caspar Hauser? A member of an obscure sect, where sports are heresy? Or does he hail from Outer Mongolia?"

"Almost. He's from Russia, one of our graduate students. I must say, if they could all play like that, I'd up the number of overseas students on the spot."

The third ball of the over came spinning down the pitch. Kuryakin stepped forward and smote it mightily, to resounding cheers from the watching Junior Members.

"A splendid shot," said Lord Peter, admiringly. "Is it all that clean living and physical jerks, do you think? Perhaps I should abjure my decadent ways and start taking cold baths. I say, look at him sprint down the crease, with wingèd heels as English Mercuries – well, one Russian Mercury anyway. You were quite right, Duffers, this is well worth the trip. And not just because I wanted a chance to congratulate you personally on your election to the Royal Society. What's the next stop? A Nobel?"

"Oh, there's no need for that," said the newly-fledged FRS modestly. "As a matter of fact, I had a bit of an ulterior motive for inviting you up here. That is to say, I've been meaning to ask you - well, look here, Flim, the truth of it is, the cricket was just a lure. The fact is, I'm in a bit of a fix.”

"Spit it out," said Lord Peter, turning perhaps half of his attention – for he could spare no more - from the goings-on on the cricket pitch. "Sing to me, and beat upon my whorlèd ear."

Sir John hesitated. "It's all rather awkward, old man. I don't know if you heard this on the grapevine, since we managed to keep it out of the newspapers, thank God, but one of our Fellows killed himself last week. Dr Gregory Black, a mathematician. A very solid chap in his field, but a bit of a queer fish."

"How did he die?"

"He shot himself," said Sir John, with a grimace.

"Shot himself?" said Wimsey. "That's rather dashing of him. In my experience your scholastic types prefer poison. Was a woman involved? _Cherchez la femme_ and all that?"

"We don't know," replied the Master. "Though to be quite honest, I can't imagine any woman getting involved with Black. He wasn't what you'd call the answer to a maiden's prayer."

"The Lord answers all prayers," said Wimsey serenely. "But sometimes the answer is no. Oh, I say, well played!"

"Well, quite," said Sir John. "And I rather think that would be the maiden's answer in this particular case. But the fact of the matter is, we don't know why he did it, because he didn't leave a suicide note."

"How d'you know it was suicide then?"

"The police were reasonably satisfied it was. He shot himself in the Fellows' Garden, at a time when all College members were accounted for - it was Founder's Dinner that night, so we had a full house - and there was no sign of any intruder."

"What with? A shotgun? An army pistol?"

"Well, that's a very curious thing, and rather unfortunate. He shot himself with Milton's pistol. John Milton was a Christ's man, as I'm sure you're aware, and amongst the College treasures are a pair of duelling pistols that he bequeathed us. They're kept on display in a case in the SCR, or at least one of them is. The other is currently in the hands of Her Majesty's constabulary."

"Fingerprints?"

"On the gun? Only Black's own. So you see, it must have been suicide."

"Yes, but the murderer could perfectly well have wiped his off and pressed Black's cold, dead hand against the metal afterwards. Very sloppy thinking, Duffers, though I suppose it's no more than one would expect from The Other Place. Who found the body?"

"Croft, the night porter. He was locking the place up when he heard the shot. Of course he rushed into the garden immediately, but he didn't see anyone."

"The murderer might have hidden in the herbaceous border, and then hopped over the wall whilst Croft was off raising the alarm."

"Well, I'm not sure which would be more dreadful – that Black was despairing enough to take his own life, or that some unscrupulous murderer did away with him. But either way, that's not what's troubling me. A couple of days later, I found this in my pigeonhole."

He handed over an envelope. Lord Peter perused the contents, his expression darkening as he read.

"Don't hold any truck with anonymous letters," he said, handing it back to Sir John. "I'm surprised you didn't bin the beastly thing as soon as you'd read it."

"Well, I would, normally," said the Master, "but this is a bit different from the usual poison pen letter, you must admit. Suppose the tip-off's genuine?"

"But surely if young Kuryakin was a KGB assassin he'd have sloped off after the job was done? Urgently recalled to the Motherland, unexpected illness of agèd parent or something?"

"But perhaps they were hoping his cover wouldn't be blown. Then they could use him again."

"Cutting a swathe through the academic institutions of Europe, you mean? Might be rather obvious if dons start dropping like flies every time our man shows up. I suppose his academic credentials are genuine?"

"I did have a quiet word with his supervisor, and the work he's done here on quantum mechanics entirely lives up to his references, so he's the real thing in that respect. Mind you, there wouldn't be much point in getting a man into Cambridge who wasn't up to it intellectually, he'd be found out in no time."

"And is it a convincing allegation? I mean, was Black the sort of chap the KGB would want to rub out?"

"It's possible, I suppose. He was staunchly anti-communist. I don't know if his Red-baiting activities extended beyond lengthy rants over the port, but if they did, that might account for it."

"What about his research? What was he working on when he died?"

The Master looked vague. Keeping up with the research activities of his Fellows was evidently something he regarded as going above and beyond the call of duty. "Something to do with number theory, I should think," he said, hesitantly. "That was his field. I suppose he might have stumbled across something significant, but it's hard to imagine what. It's no good asking me about it, I'm an applied chap. Pure mathematics isn't my thing."

Peter nodded. "It doesn't sound as if there's anything in it, but why don't you go to the police and let them investigate?”

"And suppose this isn't a tip-off, but just some spiteful little cad who's got it in for Kuryakin? Once he's tarred with that brush, he'll never get clean again, even if the police prove his innocence ten times over."

"And neither will Christ's? 'Commie College Harbours KGB Hit Man' sort of thing?"

"I admit I'd rather avoid those sorts of headlines if I can. I wish you'd do a spot of sleuthing, old man, see if there's any truth in the accusation. You've got the requisite SIS background, after all."

"Yes, but the Soviets aren't my area of expertise. Bit of a drawback not parleying the lingo, you know. Still, if - by George, will you look at that!"

The putative KGB assassin had struck the ball for six. It went sailing across the boundary, over the pavilion and bounced into the road beyond. There was a squeal of brakes.

"A hit! A very palpable hit! I say, he's lucky he didn't put that car windscreen out." Lord Peter paused, remembering another cricket match with an unexpectedly brilliant player. "Look here, Duffers, invite Kuryakin to High Table tonight, and I'll run my beady eye over him. Chap who plays cricket like that could be capable of anything."

"I'll invite him," said Sir John, "but he won't come. He's a nice enough young man, but not at all clubbable. Got a bit of a chip on his shoulder about class privileges."

"Then get the whole cricket team up and honour our Soviet friend as Man of the Match - even my cursorary eye can tell you he'll have earned it – and he can't wriggle out without looking damned ungracious. And seat me next to him, I'll do a spot of pumping. By Jove, did you see that? Well played, sir! Well played! Thanks so much for inviting me, Duffers. I owe you one."


	2. IN THE FELLOWS' GARDEN

Lord Peter returned to his rooms after the match to find Bunter debating the relative merits of charcoal grey versus anthracite socks as High Table attire. "Although since the College was victorious, my lord, I venture to recommend the _grisailles_ as indicating a desire to share in the general _esprit de corps._ "

"Charcoal will do fine," said his lordship, with the air of a man with a mind above socks. "Bunter, I don't suppose that by any remote and unlikely chance you packed my magnifying monocle, did you? All right, you needn't look so beastly smug about it. Wait, I feel a prediction coming on. You have brought the fingerprint powder and the insufflator as well. Tell me, Bunter, do you have a little crystal ball that you consult before hauling out the suitcases? Or do you sit up of nights, communing with juggling fiends? Because I don't see how else you could possibly have known we were going to need all this stuff. We haven't used it for years."

"I have long admired Lord Baden Powell's maxim that one should always be prepared, my lord," replied Bunter, throttling every hint of excitement with the ruthlessness of a thuggee.

"You are a wonder of nature," said Lord Peter admiringly. "When you die, they will pickle your remains and put them on display for posterity to gawp at, like a domestic Julia Pastrana." 

"Am I to understand, my lord, that something in the nature of a detective case has aroused your interest?"

"It has, and you are. Do you know, Bunter, I thought I'd had enough of murder, what with the war and all that, not to mention corpses rudely forcing themselves on my attention wherever I went. Things have come to a pretty pass when a chap can't even go on his honeymoon without a cadaver dancing attendance. But it seems that exclusively serving the _lares_ and _penates_ loses its charm after a while." 

"Perhaps, my lord, the domestic tranquillity that arises from all the young gentlemen being away at school is proving rather too tranquil for your lordship's temperament?" 

"I daresay you're right. At all events, since one of the College Fellows has been obliging enough to expire of a gunshot wound in the Fellows' Garden, let us not look a gift case in the mouth."

"Indeed not, my lord. Perhaps your lordship would care to supply further details of the matter?"

His lordship certainly did care to. Bunter listened attentively to Peter's description of Black's death and the arrival of the anonymous letter. "Not that it made any direct accusations," Wimsey hastened to add. "It just said 'Kuryakin KGB. Ask Black.' But Duffers has understandably got the wind up about it."

"If we are treating the case as murder, am I to understand that you lend credence to this letter, my lord?" enquired Bunter. Wimsey groaned.

"Goes against the grain to ally oneself with poison pens, doesn't it?" he said. "I suppose we could set out to prove it was suicide, which I regret to say is _prima facie_ the more likely explanation, and therefore not much of a challenge, but it would at least give us the satisfaction of putting a spoke through our chap's wheel. Still and all, Bunter, I'd rather look for villainy. Even if Black was murdered, the deed could perfectly well have been committed by someone other than Kuryakin. Perhaps them what done Black in, done him in, if not for a hatpin, then for some other low, personal motive. Did he perhaps pen a particularly vicious article rubbishing a rival's claims to intellectual superiority? Did he snatch the prize for the Fattest Marrow from the usual holder at the St Neot's annual fête? There are manifold motives for murder beyond the political, and men have died and worms have eaten them without the KGB being involved. I say, here's a thought – what if the letter was written by the murderer himself, to divert attention from his role in Black's defunction? In that case we should have the satisfaction of not only clearing Kuryakin's good name, but also of bringing the poison pen to justice. I feel very much better about this now. All are my scruples fading away. In fact, I declare myself of the homicide party. And you, Bunter, had better stick up for suicide, in order that our combined perspectives retain a degree of impartiality. And now, since you have very clairvoyantly brought the kit, shall we shog? I am in the mood for a little gentle snooping, and the Fellows' Garden awaits."

The snooping proved a most satisfactory activity, Wimsey being of an age when the sight of a fine herbaceous border does more than even cricket can to justify God's ways to man, and the Fellows' Garden sported several exceptionally impressive specimens of the genre. It was a fine breathing evening, trembling on the verge of full summer, and what with the humming of the bees and the birdsong and the heady scent of flowers, it was hard to imagine a more delightful spot. The old stone walls which enclosed the garden on three sides – the fourth wall being provided by the dignified 17th century beauty of the Fellows' Building – gave it a _hortus conclusus_ feel, and, as a sort of bonus for the historically inclined, there was the remarkable old tree to admire, under which John Milton had supposedly composed some of his more unreadable poetry. 

_"With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves,_  
And hears the unexpressive nuptial song,  
In the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love…" 

Lord Peter recited helpfully, in case Bunter should not be familiar with the more inspiring parts of _Lycidas_ , and then broke off to add, "And this must be where Black rested his own oozy locks just before pulling the trigger. See the discolouration on the bark? And that hole in the centre must be where the bullet went in. Dug out by the police, I suppose. Shame, I should have liked to have seen it. I say, it went in quite a way, though, look how far I can poke my finger in! I wonder where he got the gunpowder from? Duffers says the bullets were stored with the pistol in the SCR, but I can't imagine they kept a handy packet of gunpowder in there with it. Shockingly lax security, don't you think? I'm surprised dozens of Fellows haven't been slain when feelings run high after a particularly tense meeting of the Governing Body. Ah well, at least Black enjoys the privilege of having been the One and Only. Dead in his prime, young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer. I wonder what else we can find?" 

The answer to that rhetorical question was: disappointingly little. There were no signs of anyone having lurked within the Garden's walls. The aforementioned fine herbaceous borders were entirely devoid of incriminating footprints, and Milton's Walk, the passage outside the wall which marked the boundary of College territory, entirely failed to show marks such as might have been made by an individual leaping from the wall onto the ground. 

"If there was a murderer, it must have been a College member," said Lord Peter, aware that he was clutching at straws. "No-one else could have gone through the main gate out of College without being noticed."

"I thought all College members were accounted for at the time of Dr Black's death, my lord?"

"Quite right, Bunter. All were foregathered for merry-making in the Hall. But one must not forget that Duffers, bless his democratic little soul, is an Athenian. When he thinks of College members he thinks upon the free men and the citizens, and not upon the women and the slaves. Doubtless the Junior and Senior members were all present and correct, snouts in the trough, but what of the bedders, Bunter? What of the porters, the gardeners, the kitchen staff? What if the College Butler did it? Besides, it had to be someone who could sneak into the SCR and liberate the pistol without attracting undue attention."

"The kitchen staff and the butler would have been on duty during Formal Hall, my lord, and it would have been a matter of some note had a bedder or a gardener still been on the premises so late in the evening. The second porter, however, is a different matter. I shall make enquiries as to who was on duty that night."  
"Do that, Bunter mine, and I shall betake me to the local police station and demand a copy of the report."

Regrettably, the police report proved as uncooperative as the Fellows' Garden to the eager seeker after homicide. 

"We can narrow down the time of death to within a few minutes, my lord," said the helpful young constable on desk duty, "on account of Mr Croft having been very conveniently entering the vicinity just as the shot was fired. There's not many corpses as is so helpful in that respect."

"Most obliging of him," agreed Lord Peter. "And did the convenient Mr Croft also see the victim pull the trigger?"

"Unfortunately not, my lord, owing to a clump of trees having got in the way, but then I daresay the deceased had picked a secluded spot specially. He wasn't shot by anyone else, my lord, if that's what you're thinking, because the doctor could tell from where the bullet went in – it's this bit of the report here, my lord – 'The angle of entry is consistent with the victim having inserted the pistol into his mouth with his left hand before firing'."

"And Black was left-handed?" 

"He was, as has been testified to by…let me see… oh yes, Mr Bell, his lawyer. And Mrs Winterbottom, the Master's housekeeper."

"The Master's housekeeper? What on earth did you need to interview her for?"

"Well, we didn't really need to, my lord, but she insisted. She's one of those ladies who it's hard to refuse, if you know what I mean. Anyway, her late husband was the College boatman, so she knew Dr Black was left-handed from seeing him out punting."

"She sounds like a bit of a dragon," said his lordship, who was not above exploiting the bonds of male solidarity in the service of Truth. "But in spite of her expert witness, did you dust the pistol for pawprints, just to make sure it was Black who fired it?"

"Of course, my lord," said the young constable, not in the least offended. "Clean as a whistle, it was. Apart from Dr Black's prints, of course."

Here, at last, Wimsey thought, was a tiny discrepancy, the minutest crack in the story of suicide. The pistols, after all, had been Milton's own, proudly displayed in the SCR. Surely the College Butler must have taken them down occasionally, if only to give them a good polishing? The complete absence of any prints but Black's suggested that someone had deliberately removed evidence of their own handling of the pistol. 

At least the police had not missed the implications of the murder weapon's historic status. The helpful constable was eager to explain to Lord Peter Wimsey that the Cambridgeshire force was even now pursuing the question of where the gunpowder necessary to fire the shot might have come from. Not a chemist in the county would be immune from their scrutiny, although they had not, as yet, turned up one who remembered selling gunpowder to a recent customer. 

"And you can be sure they would if anyone had, my lord," said the constable, "for it's not as if gunpowder's in high demand around here, except for firecrackers when Bonfire Night's coming up, which of course it wasn't, it being May. But if anyone should, I shall be sure and let you know, my lord."


	3. A TOUR OF THE MASTER'S LODGE AND DINNER IN THE HALL

The Cricket Club dinner began with drinks for all in the Master's Lodgings, a pleasantly opulent building situated opposite the Porters' Lodge in First Court. Lord Peter, who had been invited early in order that he might show his appreciation of the interior architecture, gave an approving whistle as he was ushered into the drawing room.

"I say, Duffers, this is a bit of all right," he said, flapping a hand at the broad magnificence of the chimney piece. "Early sixteenth century, isn't it? Who was the clod who covered up the outside with all that Italianate rubbish?"

"I rather like it myself," said Sir John, "but then I'm not a historian. If it's sixteenth century you're after, let me show you the upper rooms. They were built for Lady Margaret Beaufort when she founded the College, so they go back to the early 1500s. Watch your step here, the staircase is rather uneven. This is her oratory in here - no spiritually-minded lady could be without one in those days, of course – and look, I always think this is rather fun, it's a private window opening into the chapel, so she could look down on the undergraduates at prayer without distracting them with sinful thoughts."

"Lady M. must have had a very good opinion of her own appearance," observed Peter. "Have you got any more of these secret bits, Duffers? I love a good hidden passage. And it's the sort of thing a prudent Master might have constructed during the Civil War, you know, in case the Roundheads came a-knocking.

_"The King observing with judicious eyes,_  
The state of both his Universities,  
To Oxford sent a troop of horse; and why?  
That learned body wanted loyalty:  
To Cambridge books he sent, as well discerning  
How much that loyal body wanted learning." 

"As a matter of fact," said Duffield, refusing to rise to the bait, "the undergraduates of Christ's were as a loyal a body of Cromwellians as you could hope to meet. The little beasts still use that as an excuse for not standing up when the Fellows enter Hall, you know. They probably gave the poor Master some uneasy nights, which may explain why the main bedroom is located over the antechapel. It's good to know I shall be able to nip down the turret staircase and fling myself before the altar when the revolution comes, though what good that will do me in these godless days, I'm not entirely sure."

For all the disapproval in his words, his tone was fond, and Wimsey smiled.

"Finally getting a feeling for tradition, Duffers? Most unlike you. I thought you were all about Progress and the New."

"In science, yes. There's no excuse for getting fossilised there. But I don't mind a few cultural relics in College life. It adds a touch of flavour, don't you think? Look, if you poke your head out here, you can see a remarkably fine stained glass – oh!"

"What's up?" said Wimsey, pulling his head back in. The Master held out the window latch for his inspection, a queer expression on his face. 

"It just broke off in my hand," he said. "I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later. Goodness knows how old it is. Still, it's a bit of a shock. I rather thought College buildings lasted forever."

"Heavens no, take it from me, anyone in charge of an historic pile like this is engaged in perpetual battle with the forces of entropy. You should see the annual repair bill for Duke's Denver." 

"I shall inform the Bursar," said Sir John, still frowning. "I hope this isn't an omen that College is about to collapse around our ears." 

"Change and decay in all around I see," said Wimsey, with the lugubrious satisfaction of a dentist examining a financially promising set of teeth. "Just regard that thingummy you're holding as a _memento mori_ in the proper sixteenth century fashion, say a few Hail Marys and forget about it."

Sir John shook himself. "I think," he said, "I have been watching too much cricket. It depresses me to see athletic young men sprinting across the field like greyhounds. It reminds me that I'm a decrepit old codger with a dicky ticker and a tendency to gout." 

He pulled so gloomy a face that Lord Peter could not help but laugh. "Thank goodness for the life of the mind, eh?" he said consolingly. "At least the old grey matter keeps churning away, whatever state the rest of one may be in. Anyway, I think it's dashed tactless, your blithering on about decrepitude and decay to a man of my advancing years. I had much rather live in blissful ignorance of what time hath wrought, which is why there is no looking-glass in my bedroom. So long as there is a spring in my step and a song on my lips, I care not a fig for that fell sergeant and all his little minions. Come on, you'd better buck up if you're going to show me the rest of the Lodge before the heroes of the hour arrive. Oh blast, that must be them coming now, with ever so airy a tread. We'll have to put off the grand tour till later." 

It was indeed the First Eleven whose arrival Wimsey had discerned, their high spirits drawing tolerant glances from the Fellowship, who were following more sedately behind. Not content with having masterminded the seating arrangements for dinner, Sir John hastened to introduce Lord Peter to Kuryakin the very second the latter turned up.

"My dear boy, have a spot of sherry," he said thrusting a glass in the young man's direction. "Have you met my old friend, Lord Peter Wimsey? He was a great cricketing man, in his youth – I daresay you've heard of Wimsey of Balliol? No? Well, he was very taken by your performance on the cricket pitch this afternoon. He enjoys a good match when he isn't sleuthing around on Her Majesty's Service. Will you excuse me a moment, Flim? I must just go and bend the Dean's ear about the fireworks for the May Ball. I really don't think they're secure in the cellar of B Staircase, there are too many spare keys floating about." So saying, he flitted off to mingle, satisfied that duty had been done.

"Dear me," said Lord Peter conversationally, "does the College have a problem with pyromania?" He spoke light-heartedly, but Kuryakin seemed to take it with the same lack of humour that had characterised all Peter's contact with Bolsheviks and their sympathisers. Not that he looked particularly Slavic, resembling neither a horny-handed son of an agricultural cooperative, nor, in spite of the surname, a scion of the Russian aristocracy. His was hair as pale as Peter's own, and his eyes neither grey nor slanting, but a curiously Aryan blue. His clothes, however, were another matter. Poverty might have excused his suit, which was cheap and ill-fitting, but not the gown, which was evidently third or fourth hand, and had been torn at some point and the rip inexpertly mended. It was worn with a provocative air that said the owner did not care a single damn for such outmoded English traditions as academic robes. 

This attitude appeared to encompass the younger sons of Dukes as well. Beyond an evidently insincere, "It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance," it proved difficult to draw more than a monosyllable of conversation from him. Wimsey, who had started the evening feeling well-disposed towards the young man, found his stock of goodwill rapidly diminishing. As each of his overtures was rebuffed, he felt himself slipping unwillingly into a persona he thought he had grown out of years before.

"Jolly old place, Cambridge, what?" he said. "Bet it makes a change from Mother Russia. Don't you feel homesick at all?"

"I miss the plumbing," said Kuryakin coldly. "But sacrifices have to be made for the privilege of working with some of the finest minds in my field."

"So no complaints, then? Been treating you well, have they?"

"No and yes. Thank you."

"Food decent?"

"Yes."

"Making friends all right?"

"Yes."

All in all, it was a relief when, after some half an hour of sherry-drinking and congratulatory chit-chat, the College Butler announced that dinner was served, and the celebrants proceeded along a private corridor directly to Hall. After the beauties of the Fellows' Garden and the Master's lodgings, Peter was disappointed to discover that the Hall had been "improved" by those tireless modernizers, the Victorians. The sombre wood panelling and beams sorted ill with the black-and-white tiled floor, and the eminent Christ's alumni, whose portraits gazed down upon the diners, seemed to a man to be frowning their displeasure at what had been done to their domain in the name of progress. 

Thanks to Sir John's manoeuvrings, Wimsey found himself once again next to Kuryakin, seated directly beneath a portrait of an elderly Charles Darwin, whose beard was so long, and rendered with such loving attention to detail, that his lordship was rather afraid he would find bits of it floating in his soup.

The evening was, taken all in all, a rather depressing experience. The food was designed more to encourage academic excellence than sybaritic ecstasies, and the conversation consisted of the usual High Table more-erudite-than-thou one-upmanship, with the additional frisson of traditional Oxbridge rivalry to give spice to the drawling display of learning. The young, he had been warned, would be boisterous, having wiped St John's eye in a fair fight. Wimsey hoped there would not be any bun-throwing. At his age, that sort of thing no longer seemed as much fun as it once had, and he was relieved when it became apparent that the euphoria of victory was expressing itself in nothing more damaging to the dress than a few riotous songs. 

The Man of the Match, seated to his left, observed the hilarity with an air of sullen disapproval that Peter found rather provoking. 

"Nice to see young people enjoying themselves, what?" he bellowed into Kuryakin's ear, over the noise of a particularly vulgar rendition of the Eton Boating Song.  
"High Table certainly offers an excellent vantage point from which to observe the benefits conferred by a public school education," responded the Russian. Were it not for these outbursts, one might have thought him shy; but having been on the receiving end of rather more pieces of blistering sarcasm than was comfortable, Peter suspected it was camouflage. It seemed that, since pumping was getting him nowhere, he would have to try more direct methods.

"Nasty piece of business with your Maths Fellow," he observed.

There was no getting away from it. Kuryakin jumped, then followed up this suspicious reaction by shooting Peter a glance that was quite evidently startled. On Peter's right, the Master bent a less obvious ear in their direction.

"Odd thing, his leaving no suicide note," said Wimsey, laying out the bait, his gaze never wavering from his neighbour's face. "Makes one wonder if there was anything funny going on. In my experience suicide without any kind of parting note is very unusual, even if it's only a 'Farewell, cruel world,' sort of thing. One may still turn up, of course. What do you think?"

Kuryakin's face was unnaturally devoid of expression, as if he had pulled on a mask, but his eyes slid past his interrogator and on to the Master. Sir John, caught blatantly eavesdropping, chose to brazen it out and met his gaze full on. Kuryakin blinked hastily away and dropped his eyes to his plate. From that moment on, he refused to be drawn into any further conversation, his attention apparently fully occupied by the task of grappling with his beef _bourguignon_.


	4. IN THE CHAMPION OF THE THAMES

While Lord Peter was struggling to make a dent in Slavic inscrutability, Mr Mervyn Bunter was enjoying a glass of Greene King with Croft, the night porter, in the Champion of the Thames, a small but appealing public house located behind the College in King Street.

"A bad business this, with Dr Black," he observed, leaning his back comfortably against the bar.

"You can say that again," said Croft. "It's very hard on the new Master, just when he's tryin' to get settled in. There was people sayin' he should cancel the May Ball out of respect for the dead, but he said it was too late for that, and anyway the Junior Members would be disappointed."

"I expect it was what Dr Black would have wanted," said Bunter, reluctant to get drawn into a discussion of College politics.

"Not him," said Croft grimly. "He was dead against balls, said they was a waste of money. I wouldn't put it past him to have picked his moment out of sheer spite."  
"Why do you think he did it? Had he been acting out of the ordinary at all?"

"Dr Black? You could never tell what was goin' on inside his head. One of those little buttoned-down fellows, he was, all prim and precise, like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. But if, say, any of his letters accidentally happened to get into the wrong pigeonhole, what might happen to anyone on duty, what with the load of post we get in the Porters' Lodge, he'd kick up a fuss like the end of the world was comin'. Now you come to mention it, though, he did seem rather distracted the last few days. He come in to drop off some post one day and left his briefcase in the Lodge, and the next evening he asked me to run back and get his gown from the SCR because he'd turned up for Hall without it."

"He didn't mention any troubles?"

"Blimey, no. Not to me. Dr Black wasn't the kind to talk to the lower orders about anything."

"You found the body, didn't you?" enquired Bunter, turning to what he hoped would prove a more promising line of investigation. 

"I did," said Croft with satisfaction. "I heard the shot as I was a-coming to lock up the Fellows' Garden and I come running in and found him there, dead as you please, right under the mulberry tree. Shot with Milton's pistol under Milton's mulberry – the poor man must be turnin' in his grave."

"It must have been a shock for you. Were you all on your own?"

"Oh yes, I does the evening rounds by meself. Daley stays in the Lodge, you see, in case anyone wants to get in or out. Nice work if you can get it, eh? He got most of the crossword done while I was dealin' with the corpus." He laughed good-naturedly, his humour doubtless improved by the fact that the sedentary Daley had thereby missed out on all the glory.

"And the shot killed him straight out?"

"Oh yes, dead as a doornail, he was. He'd stuck the pistol in his mouth like this, see" - here Mr Croft obligingly demonstrated, with the aid of an ale bottle, exactly the angle the pistol had taken - "and blown the back of his head clean off."

"Good heavens!" said Mr Bunter, with gratifying horror. "And you're sure the injury was self-inflicted? You didn't see anyone else in the garden? It was getting dark, wasn't it?"

"Twilight," agreed Croft. "It was about quarter to nine, see, just after sunset. I starts locking up at half past and it takes me about a quarter of an hour to get to that there gate."

"And yet you're sure there was no-one else present?"

"Not that I noticed. Not but what I was looking for anyone else, mind, me head being so full of poor Dr Black. But I took it for granted that whoever had been in there earlier had gone, because I didn't hear any talking."

"You heard someone earlier?"

"Oh yes, when I was doin' me rounds a couple of hours before. One of the young gentlemen in Third Court had a guest what was makin' a bit of a spectacle of hisself, so I escorted him off the premises by the back gate just before Formal Hall, and on the way back I heard voices argufying down at the bottom of the Fellows' Garden."

"Was it Dr Black?"

"I'd stake me life on it."

"And the other person?"

"I have no idea," said Croft regretfully. "I didn't have a look-see, because the Senior Members can be a bit touchy about people intruding on their private business."

"Did you inform the police?"

"Course I did, but they said since there was no proof it was Black what I heard, it wasn't much use."

"You definitely didn't recognise the other voice?"

"I didn't hear it to reckernise. It could of been just Dr Black rantin' away to hisself for all I know, except that he left in pauses, like someone was talking back. I didn't think nothing of it at the time. It's not like he was done in by anyone. I was a stretcher bearer in the Great War, I was, and I seen any number of blokes what had shot theirselves. When it all got too much for 'em, they'd stick their pistols in their mouths and boom! Brains hangin' out all over the place, just like poor Black."

"Dear me, how frightful," said Mr Bunter, who was quite as well acquainted with the phenomenon as Croft, but had no wish to detract from the Porter's moment in the limelight. "It was one of Milton's pistols, wasn't it? A very romantic gesture, using a weapon of such historic import. Would you say Dr Black was a romantic in nature, or perhaps a particular admirer of John Milton?"

"Dr Black," said Croft with some force, "wouldn't of known what romance was if it jumped up and bit him. He didn't have no poetry in his soul. All about book-keeping he was, why I remember when he was Bursar…" and with that Croft launched into one of those institutional anecdotes that are tedious to all but the most involved participants. At least the ale was good, and Bunter consoled himself with the thought that, even if he did have to listen to the Porter's tales of collegiate back-stabbing, at least he was spared the horrors of High Table gossip. Not for the first time, he reflected that he would not willingly change places with Lord Peter for all his lordship's wealth and domestic happiness.

Thanks to Mr Croft's friendship with the landlord of the Champion, and his custodianship of an enormous bunch of College keys, he and Bunter were able to circumvent both closing time and the College curfew, walking in boldly via the front gate at a little after midnight. Here they parted ways, Croft to return to his bachelor abode a few streets away, and Bunter to his lordship's rooms in Third Court. It was a splendid night, clear and fresh, with a small, round moon like a silver button, as neat and ancient as the little college it illuminated, and Bunter was seized with a sudden desire for a stroll before bed. It occurred to him as he passed the gate to the Fellow's Garden that there might be some value in establishing whether Mr Kuryakin could reach the garden from his room, via some circuitous route behind the buildings that would protect him from prying eyes. Accordingly he doubled back through Second Court, but instead of passing through the archway that linked the Hall to the Senior Combination Room, he bent his steps behind the building and disappeared into a sort of shrubbery. What he found there was a great deal more exciting than he had anticipated.


	5. THE GUEST SET IN STEVENSON

The following morning Bunter, heroically disregarding the lingering effects of the Greene King, made a sortie into the College kitchens and returned clutching to his bosom a frying pan and spatula. Nothing in his manner suggested extreme eagerness to recount to his lordship the events of the preceding night, but his determined assault upon the bacon and eggs he had stored in the little kitchen at the end of the corridor soon resulted in an aroma that no human nostril could long resist. It had penetrated Lord Peter’s slumber within a matter of moments – the door to his rooms having somehow been left slightly ajar – and that nobleman was already seated at the table, wrapped in a peacock-patterned silk dressing gown and sniffing the air like an eager labrador, by the time Bunter’s returning tread could be heard in the corridor.

"Morning, Bunter, find anything out last night?" he said by way of greeting, as a pot of coffee was set down before him. 

"A great deal, my lord," returned Bunter, cherishing a small glow of gratification deferred. "If you will allow me to fetch the bacon and eggs, I shall explain in detail." So saying, he departed once again for the kitchen. But as he processed at a stately pace back along the corridor, the bacon still sizzling slightly upon its plate, he found himself accosted by a wistful Junior Member.

"I say, that smells fantastic, is that for his lordship? I wish we were getting that for brekker."

Bunter recognised the young gentleman as the Captain of the Cricket Club, and though it cost him some pain – he had not intended to defer the gratification of delivering his report for quite so long – he had spent too many years in Wimsey's service not to recognise a prime pumping opportunity when he saw one. Accordingly, he took the liberty of issuing an invitation to join his lordship for breakfast. 

"Henderson, isn't it?" said Wimsey brightly. "I thoroughly enjoyed the match yesterday. Young Kuryakin is quite an ornament to the team."

"Oh, he is, sir," said Henderson, displaying all the advantages of an expensive education in his ability to juggle the production of entire sentences without interrupting the process of becoming intimately acquainted with the contents of his plate. "He ought to be a Blue, but he won't try out."

"Why's that?"

"He says he can't afford to take the time from his research. He's a graduate student you know, even though he looks about twelve," - this piece of information, offered in all sincerity by one whose scrubbed pink countenance proclaimed him to be barely out of the nursery himself, made Lord Peter smile fondly - "and these overseas chappies do tend to keep their noses to the grindstone."

"But you got him to join the College First Eleven? Don't you chaps practise much?" 

"Of course we do," said Henderson, reddening slightly, then added with touching frankness, "Even if it didn't look much like it yesterday. I think Kuryakin just likes to let off steam occasionally. He gets a bit wire-happy sitting over books all day long."

"It must be rather lonely," said Wimsey thoughtfully. "Cramming the whole time."

"I don't think he minds, sir. He doesn't seem all that keen on people."

"Rubs them up the wrong way, does he?"

"In a manner of speaking. He thinks he's cleverer than everyone else. And I suppose he is, but that sort of attitude does rather get up one's nose."

"He's some sort of mathematician, isn't he?" said Wimsey. "Must have been a shock for him when Dr Black snuffed it. Good thing it didn't put him off his game."

There was a pause, during which Henderson thoughtfully shovelled bacon into his mouth and proceeded to chew on it with the air of a man considering whether or not to impart a great secret. 

"Actually," he said eventually, "I think he was rather relieved."

"Oh?" said Peter, somewhat taken aback. "What gave you that impression?"

"Well, Black got on his nerves rather. Always inviting him for drinks and so forth. And it would have been awkward to say no. I mean, he was Tutor for Graduates."  
"And this made Kuryakin uncomfortable, did it? Any idea why?"

"Black was very anti-Soviet, sir. He probably spent all his time haranguing Kuryakin about politics. I know he once told him he ought to defect. Kuryakin was spitting blood over that. Said he didn't go around telling us we were a bunch of decadent, imperialist wimps heading for the dustbin of world history, so why should Black bang on at him about the evils of collectivism."

"Did he say anything else?"

"He said anyone who didn't believe in class privilege only had to look around him, but we were all too blind to see what was under our noses."

"No, I meant about Black."

"Oh, I see. No, only that he wished he wouldn't keep wasting his time. I think Black tried to get him to come and see him about three times the week before the last match - I remember because Kuryakin asked me if I couldn't reschedule the practice sessions so he had an excuse not to go."

Having delivered this intriguing titbit, Henderson swallowed down the final piece of egg and sprang to his feet, with the air of one who cannot be tempted by even a fourth rasher of bacon to overhear the bugle blast of Duty. "Thanks ever so much for the breakfast, sir. I'm afraid I must dash, I've got a supervision at nine. It's wretchedly uncivilised, but old Hodders is a dragon. I hope you enjoy the rest of your stay, sir. Cheers, Bunter!" And with that he was gone.

"Shame," said Lord Peter, gazing after him. "The conversation was just getting interesting. I wonder why Kuryakin was so keen to avoid Black just before he died? Bunter, you are hovering. You know I will not tolerate hovering, especially at breakfast. If you have something to say, spit it out."

"Yes, my lord. I was awaiting an opportunity to report on the events of last night, my lord."

"Oh, and Henderson interrupted you, did he? Sorry about that. Well, fire away. I am all ears."

Drawing a deep breath, Bunter launched himself upon the tale of the previous night's adventures. Lord Peter listened closely to the key details of the conversation with Croft, striking his palm against the table in triumph when Bunter related the story of the argument in the Fellows' Garden, but his eyes began to shine when Bunter insinuated himself into the shrubbery behind the student residences in First Court.

"There is an uninterrupted view of Mr Kuryakin's window from there, my lord, and the light was burning in his room. Not that this is in itself a matter of any great significance. However, in the course of concealing myself I ascertained that I was not the first person to have taken up this position."

"Indeed? Now that's interestin'. And the basis for this supposition is?"

"Trampled vegetation, footprints and a number of discarded cigarette stubs, my lord. I secured a sample of these last for more detailed analysis." So saying, Bunter pulled a small metal box from his pocket, from which he produced a sad-looking twist of brownish paper. 

"Not a professional stakeout, then," said his lordship, frowning over the item. "Nasty little Turkish cigarettes, as smoked by nasty little people with nasty little minds, and no idea of covering their tracks. Hmm, that means our formula now has four unknown quantities: the Murderer, the Poison Pen, the Unseen Argufyer and the Lurker. The entities are multiplying. However, my money is on the Lurker and the Poison Pen turning out to be one and the same, which would be an elegant solution. Of course, it would be even more elegant if they could also be conflated with the Unseen Argufyer and the Murderer, but that's probably too much to hope for. Sorry, I'm ramblin'. Were the footprints any good?"

"I regret to say, my lord, that they were very unsatisfactory footprints. The weather has been inconveniently fine of late and the gardener does not water the shrubbery. On the evidence of the one reasonably clear specimen I could find, I should say that at least one of the shoes was a trifle down-at-heel. Beyond that, I could establish nothing, apart from the approximate size."

"And this was?"

"Eight and a half, my lord."

"Duly noted. The bedders'll know who's a candidate Cinderella. Pray, continue."

"At about half past midnight, I observed Mr Kuryakin open his window and descend to the ground by means of the ivy."

"Good heavens! Our spy in the shrubbery wasn't wasting his nights, then."

"Mr Kuryakin then scaled the College walls and headed into town with the aid of a bicycle. I availed myself of a further bicycle - undergraduates these days are sadly careless about locking their possessions - and gave chase."

"And where did the fox go to earth?"

"In the Cavendish Laboratory, my lord."

Lord Peter groaned. "Don't tell me, my Bunter, after all this excitement, that the quarry was merely taking a late-running experiment off the boil? Assuming quantum mechanics actually do experiments. They sound more like chappies who'd fix your car."

"Quantum mechanics is primarily a theoretical undertaking, my lord. Nonetheless, the department of Theoretical Physics is based in the Cavendish Laboratory, and Mr Kuryakin possesses a key. He neglected, however, to lock the door behind him. Whether he forgot it in his haste, or whether this was another example of youthful carelessness, I cannot say."

"So you entered without breaking, like an enterprising little burglar. I heartily approve. And where did the scent lead?"

"To the second floor, my lord. I could not follow too closely for fear of being observed, although my task was rendered easier by the fact that Mr Kuryakin chose to use a torch rather than switch on the lights."

"Thank God for that! That knocks the experiment hypothesis firmly on the head. Dead, dead, and never called me mother!"

"Indeed, my lord, it was a most satisfactory observation. Mr Kuryakin's destination proved to be a storage room of some kind. I concealed myself behind a bust of Nils Bohr until he re-emerged. At this point I was compelled to choose between trailing him further or determining the reason for his visit."

"And of course you chose the latter," said Lord Peter approvingly. "Come on, don't keep me on tenterhooks, man. What was kept in the store cupboard?"  
"Dr Alan Turing's research files." 

There was a long silence. Eventually Wimsey said, "I suppose they were passed on to the University at his death. But what on earth were they doing in a store cupboard?"

"Judging by their condition, no-one has touched them since they arrived, my lord. It strikes me as a most culpable oversight."

"Perhaps they're afraid of being tainted by association," said Lord Peter grimly. "Blast them all. Oh hell, I was hoping our little Russian would turn out to be on the side of the angels, but this puts an entirely different complexion on things. All right, we took this job on, so I suppose we'd better finish it. Did Kuryakin bring anything out with him? Any suspicious-looking envelopes? Piles of papers clutched under one arm?"

"I am certain he emerged empty-handed. Whatever he was looking for, he appears not to have found it. Might I ask, my lord, if you have a theory about what might be in the files?"

"You mean you want an explanation for my sudden U-turn as regards our quarry's guilt? I'm awfully sorry, Bunter, but my tongue is tied by the Official Secrets Act. Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave my heart into my mouth, so you'll just have to take my word for it that while Dr Black seems a distinctly unlikely target for KGB attention, Turing is a different kettle of fish. I've good reason to believe that Kuryakin's guilty as charged. The question is, what do we do now? I'm damned if I'm going to let the little blighter get away with it, but if we don't go about this very carefully indeed, he'll bolt. And until we know exactly what he was looking for in those files, we won't know what the Reds are trying to get their hands on."

"Perhaps this is a matter for M15, my lord?" suggested Bunter, endeavouring to conceal his disappointment. It had been altogether too long, in his opinion, since his lordship had had a meaty murder case to chew on, and the thought of turning this one over to the faceless minions of the intelligence service caused him not inconsiderable pain.

Lord Peter clearly shared his reluctance. Instead of agreeing, he wandered over to the window and stood staring out over the Third Court lawn, his hands clasped behind his back. "I daresay you're right, Bunter," he said at last. "I just wish I trusted those fellows not to make a pig's ear of it. Turing deserves better than to be dragged through the mud twice over. What do you say we give ourselves twenty four hours to see what we can turn up? If we can find evidence that Kuryakin really did kill Black, then he'll end up behind bars and Turing's name need never crop up at all. Whereas if I go to MI5, or even the F.O., the first thing they'll do is start wondering if he was the Third Man. It's simply sickening to think of a man like Turing being mentioned in the same breath as traitors like Burgess and Maclean."

Bunter's face betrayed no flicker of relief as he said, "An excellent plan, my lord. Would your lordship wish me to continue to support the suicide hypothesis in the light of the new information?"

Wimsey gave him a sharp glance. "If that's what you want," he said. "I suppose it's no more than I deserve for not sharing the gen. No, no apologies, Bunter, you stick to your guns; you are quite right; even if we can take the KGB half of the accusation as read, the murder half still remains to be proved."

And with that Bunter had to be content.


	6. A PHONE CALL TO THE FOREIGN OFFICE

Having reached agreement on the important principle of how to proceed, Wimsey and Bunter put their heads together and decided upon a two-pronged research strategy. Bunter took himself off to wander the bowels of the University Library in pursuit of publications by Alan Turing, in the hope that this might cast some light on the contents of the looked-for files, and Lord Peter sought out a telephone, whence he placed a number of calls to friends in various government offices. It took altogether longer than he would have preferred in his current uneasy state of mind, but eventually he struck gold in the shape of an old school chum at MI5. Alas, the seam contained only tiny nuggets, as Bertie Brackenbury made clear when he rang Peter back.

"We've got very little on either of your chaps," he told him. "Black was briefly under investigation in 1951 for his association with Burgess and Maclean. He was a member of the Apostles debating club in the early '30s, which rang alarm bells, of course. More significantly, he continued to have occasional contact with both Burgess and Maclean right up to 1951, when they defected. There's no evidence of actual pro-Soviet activity, but those are rather questionable acquaintances. Are you saying we should roll out the investigation again?"

"No point," said Wimsey pithily. "Black's dead. Shot last week, supposedly by self and violent hand."

"Oho," said Bertie, with evident satisfaction. "I should have realised there'd be a body lurking somewhere if it's got your interest, Flim. Who's the other chap? The one who dunnit?"

"You tell me, Bertie. Does it seem likely? Is his file full of funerals?"

"Sorry to disappoint you, old bean, but I've got even less on your suspect than on Black. The only thing that might interest you is a recent query on his file suggesting a possible KGB connection, but the source is anonymous, and it doesn't seem to have been followed up. Doesn't say what the connection is, either, which is probably why it was dropped."

"That doesn't sound very confidence-inspiring. When was it lodged?"

"A couple of weeks ago. Second of June, to be precise."

The coincidence gave Lord Peter pause for thought. The second of June was only two days before the poison pen letter had been sent to Duffield. "Do you normally give credence to anonymous allegations?" he asked, something of his distaste for those who hide their accusations behind a veil of anonymity bleeding into his voice. "Sounds a bit Big Brother-ish, if you ask me."

"Oh, the source won't have been anonymous originally," said Bertie, rather offended. "We don't have the time, let alone the inclination, to follow up every disgruntled housewife slinging mud at her neighbour. But sometimes it's necessary to protect an informant's identity."

"Hmmm," said Peter. "So your source is someone deserving of protection, but without sufficient clout to get his tip followed up?"

"That would seem to be a reasonable deduction. At all events, there's been no action taken. Probably because there's bugger all else in the file to suggest there'd be any point. Chap checks out, end of story."

It was a poor and shrivelled harvest, but Wimsey revised his opinion of who had drawn the short straw from the research haystack when he set eyes on Bunter. His manservant had the glazed eyes and drooping shoulders of a man who has grappled with Scholarship and lost, an impression confirmed by the paucity of the notes he had taken.

"Up until 1947 Dr Turing was at the National Physical Laboratory working on something called an Automatic Computing Engine," he recited, in the tones of a schoolboy who expects to be sent to the bottom of the class for persistent under-achievement. "In 1948 he moved to Manchester University, where he continued this work, publishing a paper on computing machinery and intelligence. As far as I was able to ascertain, the results of his research in this period are all in the public domain. However, after his conviction, he was banned from working on computing engines, switched his attention to botany, and wrote a paper applying a mathematical sequence called Fibonacci numbers to plant morphology. I fear I was not qualified to understand even the most basic principles of any of this, my lord. Nor do I believe that even your lordship would make significant progress. I respectfully suggest that we call in an expert, if one can be found." 

Wimsey beamed at him. "By a happy coincidence I am having lunch at Trinity with an old acquaintance of mine, Sir Edward Fawsley, who is the Chair in Theoretical Physics. He should be able to help us, if anyone can. I have a vague recollection that he worked with Turing during the war, so if he kept in touch, he might even be able to take an educated guess at what Kuryakin was hoping to find in those files. But before I toddle off to Trinity, I'll see if I can't have a look at that other pistol of Milton's, in case it should happen to be simply packed with prints."


	7. IN THE SENIOR COMBINATION ROOM

Collins, the College Butler, was a sallow man, whose naturally sour disposition was instantly swallowed up by snobbish gratification at the prospect of showing an almost-Duke around the more historic aspects of the College. 

"I've always been a great admirer of John Milton," Lord Peter told him. " _Of man's first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste brought death into the world and all our woe…"_ – here he ran out of air and drew in a great breath – _"I sing_. And all that. I'd love to take a squint at his College rooms and the mulberry tree, and anything else of his you've got." And thus, by guile and duplicity (for it was not only Milton who was of the devil's party) Lord Peter gained access to the twin of the murder weapon.

"This is the case where the pistols are kept, my lord," the Butler said, leading the way across the Senior Combination Room. Like everything in the College, it was about a quarter of the size that Peter was used to, but exuded the familiar comfortable air of a gentlemen's club. A table spread with daily newspapers offered a degree of contact with the outside world, and an array of comfortable armchairs waited to embrace the rear end of any Fellow in retreat from the rigours of scholarship. The portraits around the walls, Peter noticed, looked down upon the goings-on with an air of positive benevolence, in contrast with the severity of their counterparts in the Hall. The College Butler ignored all such distractions, his mind and eyes focused firmly upon the glass case mounted on the wall just above a small writing desk.

"This is one of the pistols, my lord," he said deferentially. "The other is regrettably not available just at present."

"Oh yes, that unfortunate business with Dr Black," said Wimsey. "How was he able to get at it, anyway? Is the case kept locked?" 

"Oh no, my lord," answered the Butler. "It has never been considered necessary. This is the SCR, after all."

"And no-one noticed that it had gone missin'? Who was the last person in the SCR before dinner that night?"

"I couldn't say, my lord. Usually, of course, the Senior Members gather here to await my announcement that dinner is served, but on this particular occasion they had gathered in the Master's Lodge for drinks with the benefactors – it was Founder's Dinner, you see, my lord."

"I see. So people could have been comin' in and out all afternoon?"

"Yes, my lord. But most likely Dr Black took the pistol while we were all at Hall, my lord. He would have known that no-one would be in here at that time."

"Yes, very probably," agreed his lordship. "I say, you don't suppose there's any chance of holding the thing, do you? It would give me quite a thrill to touch something Milton had held in his very own hands. Makes history come alive, what? Thanks awfully. It's a flintlock I see. And with the flint still in it. Well, that explains how Black was able to get it to fire."

"The bullets are kept in a drawer in the desk," offered the Butler. "Or at least they were. The Master has them under lock and key now. He said he didn't want the Junior Members getting up to any foolish tricks now the idea had been put in their heads."

"Very wise," agreed Wimsey. "Can the undergraduates get in here, then?"

"Oh no, my lord, the door is naturally kept locked," said Collins, sounding shocked. "But young gentlemen do find ways and means, you know, especially in Rag Week, and I'm sure the Master was quite right to take precautions. Why, one time they tied two skeletons to the top of the Gatehouse, as if they were climbing the towers. And another time…"

"Very lively bunch they sound," said his lordship, listening with only half an ear. "But in the normal way of things they have no access to the SCR, at least not without a key?" To the butler's discomfort, he had donned a monocle that made his eye look abnormally large, like a goldfish in a curved bowl. "Damn fine engravings, what?" he said, poring over the pistol with a watchmaker's intensity. "A very nice piece of work indeed. I say, Collins, d'you suppose there's any trace of Milton left on this after all these years? Imagine if we could find fine fat fingerprint, left by the poet himself! Come here, I want to show you something." So saying he drew out a packet of grey powder from his breast pocket, together with a small brass tube with a leather bulb on the end. "We puff the powder over the butt like this," he said, while the butler marvelled at the eccentricities of amateur historians, "and we find that – by George, this thing is simply smothered in prints. Still, one of them may be Milton's, you never know. Perhaps this smear here, it has a certain faded glamour to it, like old poetry. And some of them are probably yours, Collins. Do you polish the pistols often?"

"It is not often necessary, my lord, being as they are kept inside the case," returned Collins in an injured tone.

"Quite right, of course, should have thought of that," said his lordship amiably. "Well, thanks awfully for letting me have a look-see. I'd better toddle off now, I'm meeting a chum for lunch and he won’t be happy if I stand him up for John Milton. Some people have no appreciation of history, unlike you and me, eh?" So saying, he crossed the butler's palm with silver and departed, his cheerful whistle still audible two thirds of the way round First Court. It was the whistle of a man who has finally laid his hand upon a tangible fact, in the midst of an ethereal sea of speculation.


	8. AT TRINITY

Sir Edward Fawsley, Professor of Theoretical Physics at The Other Place, had expressed himself delighted at the prospect of renewing his acquaintance with Lord Peter Wimsey, and welcomed him to an extremely liquid lunch in the Trinity SCR. At Peter's request, they retreated to Fawsley's rooms for their post-prandial coffee, where they wallowed in splendidly deep armchairs, and admired the Professor's collection of books, which rivalled the college library, certainly as far as the Mystery section was concerned. Lord Peter was particularly pleased to observe that several volumes of Harriet's adorned the shelves.

"Oh, yes, I'm a great admirer of your wife's," said Fawsley, chuckling at the direction of Peter's gaze. "Shame you've given up on the detective business yourself, Wimsey. One hardly ever reads about you in the papers any more. Or is that a ruse to fool the unsuspecting public?"

"I rather lost interest after the war," said Wimsey, with perfect truth.

"So you retired from the field and let the younger men have a crack at things. That's very admirable; I wish more academics saw things your way. We have a terrible tendency to refuse to be put out to pasture. When I see some of my colleagues pontificating from their Chairs on subjects they last understood thirty years ago…well, they seem to have taken Kipling to heart:

_If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew_  
To serve your turn long after they are gone,  
And so hold on when there is nothing in you  
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!' 

"Surely not all elderly scholars are past it, though?" objected Wimsey. "I can think of a number of men who wrote great works at a high old age."

"It's not unheard of," agreed Fawsley, "but that tends to happen in the humanities rather than in science. I'm not saying all the work one does in later life is useless – otherwise I should be the worst kind of hypocrite – but all the truly ground-breaking advances have been made by very young men. It's rare for an old man to be brilliant. But, of course, once he's covered himself with glory and honours, it's impossible to persuade him to give it all up and make way for the young bloods. Old dons are like old horses, you know. They cling to life, guzzling feed and taking up stable room, long past the point where they can offer anything useful in return. I sometimes think the best thing would be to shoot them all."

"Rather a draconian retirement policy," said Wimsey laughing, "though it would save a fortune in pension payments. I don't suppose Dr Black at Christ's was the first step in the implementation of your plan to win the plaudits of a grateful Exchequer?"

Sir Edward sat up as straight as his armchair would allow. "Wimsey," he said severely, "I have the distinct impression you are snooping. Didn't you just tell me you'd given up detecting?"

"I did," said Lord Peter ruefully. "The trouble is, it hasn't given me up." 

Fawsley groaned. "I knew you had to be up to something!" he said. "The moment I heard your voice on the phone I said to myself 'Get ready for the third degree.' Spit it out, old man. What dread secret of mine are you trying to uncover?"

"It's more Dr Black's dread secret, actually. Have you any idea why he might have killed himself?"

"No," said Fawsley firmly, "I have not. And I am not going to help you go ferreting around in poor Black's private life. Surely it's better to let sleeping dons lie?"

"Normally I'd agree with you," said Peter. "A man's reasons for taking his own life are none of my business. But in this instance I'm not entirely sure he did. A rumour has reached my shell-like ear that there may have been Soviet involvement in his death, and I wanted your opinion on the matter."

"Oh really, Wimsey," said the Professor, bursting into something suspiciously like laughter. "How did you come up with something so ridiculous? Poor old Black was the least likely target for an assassination you could imagine."

"What about his political leanings? He was openly anti-Soviet, wasn't he?"

"Slightly to the right of Attila the Hun, I should say. But look here, Wimsey, if being a true blue Tory was grounds for assassination, then county cricket would be in an even worse state than it already is. Black had no active political involvement in any organisation. I should think he posed about as much danger to the Soviet Union as my dog does."

"It could have been a cover."

Fawsley frowned. "What do you mean by that?"

"I should have thought the meaning was obvious," retorted Wimsey. "He was a member of the Apostles, after all. Did he have any known contact with Burgess or Maclean?"

There was no mistaking the look of unease that had crept across Fawsley's face at the mention of the Apostles; at the names Burgess and Maclean he actually winced.  
"All right, yes, as a matter of fact, he did. But really, Wimsey, it's patently absurd to think that Black might be the Third Man. He really wasn't the kind of fellow who'd sell his country out to the Soviets, and in any case, that wasn't...." He broke off, looking profoundly uncomfortable.

"Wasn't what?" persisted Wimsey, who had long since learned to overcome social niceties in the pursuit of truth.

"Well, he was... Oh, I say, Wimsey, this is damnably unpleasant, and one shouldn't speak ill of the dead, but he... well, his contact with chaps like Burgess wasn't because of his _politics_ , if you get my meaning."

"Oh, I see," said Wimsey, light dawning. "But that's exactly the sort of weakness the Soviets prey on, of course. And if they were blackmailing him he might have seen suicide as the only honourable way out."

"Yeees," said Fawsley, agreement being drawn from him as a dentist draws a tooth. "But what would they blackmail him for? Black wasn't the sort of chap to interest them. He had no political involvement and no connections - took the grammar school and scholarship route into Cambridge, and never left it again. As far as I know, his mother's his only living relative, and she's hardly in a position to do the USSR any favours. And even if they had got a hold over him, it doesn't seem very like Black to shoot himself in order to escape their clutches. He wasn't a very brave man. Some people aren't, you know."

"What about his research? Could he have been working on something that might have piqued their interest?"

"I can't imagine what. Black was a pure mathematician, an ivory tower scholar of the first order. He made some very fine contributions to our understanding of mathematical theory, but it's nothing that would get any government worked up."

"Some aspect of number theory, wasn't it?"

"The Fibonacci sequence, yes. I've got an off-print of his most recent publication in my office, if you're curious. I haven't actually read it yet, but – I say, Wimsey, what's up? You look as if you can't decide whether to shout Eureka or call for an ambulance."

"Eureka, I think. You've just put two pieces of a puzzle together for me. Tell me, how well did Black know Alan Turing?"

Sir Edward put down his coffee cup. "In what sense are we using the word 'know' here?" he asked, eyeing Peter as if he were something particularly nasty that he had just trodden in. "I'm not prepared to help you with muck-raking, if that's what you're after. Alan Turing was a fine man and his death was a disgrace to the nation, an absolute disgrace. Especially after all…" He fell silent, a mixture of emotions struggling for dominance on his face. "It's a poor excuse for justice when a man's war record can't be cited at his trial," he said finally.

"It's all right, Fawsley," said Wimsey gently. "I was seconded to Bletchley for a few months during the war, and I know all about Turing's work there. Believe me, the last thing I'm interested in is dragging his name through the mud a second time. But I do need to know if there was a connection between him and Black."

Sir Edward stared. "You were at Bletchley? When?"

"1941. As a matter of fact, I was the one who wrote the report recommending that Churchill come and see the work that was being done there."  
"Good God," said Sir Edward. "I had no idea. Next thing you'll be telling me David Niven was head of Hut 8. He was just as well qualified."

Wimsey smiled. "I am rather good at puzzles, Fawsley," he said mildly.

"Yes, I suppose you are. And now I come to think of it, Turing did mention that they'd had a peer of the realm dancing around in the early days. I suppose he meant you. Well, well, well. Bletchley hides more secrets than the pyramids."

"And Black?" prompted Wimsey. "Now that I've established my credentials, will you tell me if he knew Turing?"

Fawsley sighed. "Yes, he did," he said reluctantly. "They went back for years. They were both at King's in the '30s, you know. As to whether it was more than just friendship, I couldn't possibly comment. That sort of thing was rather part and parcel of the King's social experience in those days. It's different now, of course, especially since poor Turing's disgrace. All those chaps have battened down the hatches. Not that Black was ever the type to make a song-and-dance about it, but, well, by their works shall ye know them."

"You know Turing was working on research involving Fibonacci numbers when he died?"

"Was he?"

"Might he and Black have been collaborating?"

"It's possible. Black was inclined to deny all connection after Turing's trial – I told you he wasn't a brave man - but he may still have had contact privately. I agree that if Turing spotted a possible application for an aspect of number theory, Black would have been a good chap to look up. I say, you're not suggesting the Soviets were trying to use Black to get at Turing's work, are you?"

"It's possible, surely?"

"I don't know that it would have done them any good. Turing was forbidden to work on projects related to national security after his conviction, and all his notes were seized, so unless he was pursuing research in secret…. It's easy to check, anyway. He bequeathed his papers to the Cavendish Lab when he died, so all we have to do is go through his files. Not that that'll do you much good – you won't understand a word, frankly - but I'll tell you who could help you out, your chum Duffield. The work that got him elected to the Royal Society had something to do with Fibonacci numbers. I can't remember the details, but he'd be in a position to assess whether Turing's research had any sensitive implications. I'll get my secretary to give you access to them, if you like."

"Thanks, Fawsley, that's tremendously helpful. I'll collar Duffield as soon as I get back to Christ's, and I'll ask him if I can have a sniff at Black's own files while I'm about it. I'm rather pressed for time, though, so would it be all right if I came over to the Cavendish this evening? I'll send Bunter over after dinner to pick up the keys. And now let me ask you a different question. What do you think of Illya Kuryakin?"

"Our little Ruskie post-grad? Oh, he's definitely a Red. And I suspect that one day his research will indeed be of burning interest to the Politburo."

"A good scholar, then?"

"Outstanding. But they've no need to blackmail him, he knows his duty to the Party already."

"Any chance that he's a sleeper?"

"Almost certainly," said Fawsley, sounding surprised. "All those Russian students are, one way or another. But they're easy enough for our chaps to keep an eye on, and so far they've all toddled off back home with their doctorates without doing any harm. I say, Wimsey, you're not implying Kuryakin was involved in Black's death, are you?"

"I'm not implying anything," said Wimsey mildly. "I'm merely poking under various beds to see if any Reds come crawling out. Thanks awfully, Fawsley. You've been most helpful. I'll let you know if we find anything."


	9. IN THE FELLOWS' BUILDING

"So we now have a connection between Black and Turing to add to the connection between Turing and Kuryakin," Lord Peter reported to Bunter on his return from Trinity, a trip which had been made in rather a hurry beneath an ominous sky. "If we can just establish a connection between Kuryakin and Black, we can complete the triangle and thereby satisfy my soul's geometrical urges. There must have been something going on between them, or else Kuryakin wouldn't have made such a show of avoiding Black the week before his death, but I'm damned if I can figure out what. Let's go and rootle around in the paperwork and see what we can turn up."

Accordingly the Master, innocently making his way to the SCR for afternoon tea, found himself well and truly nobbled.

"Look here, old man, I wish you'd get me a key to Black's room so I can have a sniff around inside."

Sir John could not have paled more at this impropriety if Wimsey had asked if he could sniff around inside Black's coffin. 

"Good God, man, whatever for?" he expostulated, "I mean, the poor chap's barely cold in his grave. Pawing through his personal possessions seems positively indecent."

"I was rather hoping to find a reason why he might have killed himself," said Lord Peter. Sir John's features made a graceless transition from touched-by-death-white to pushed-too-far-red. 

"Look here, Wimsey," he said. "This is overstepping the bounds. Whatever reasons the poor chap had for doing away with himself are no concern of ours. Let him rest in peace."

"But it's very much my concern," objected Lord Peter. "You asked me to find out if the allegations against Kuryakin are correct; and they can hardly be correct if Black took his own life after being, say, diagnosed with terminal cancer, can they?" 

"I asked you to investigate the allegations; I didn't ask you to poke your nose into poor Black's private life," said Sir John firmly. "Run whatever kind of check it is your Foreign Office chaps do on Kuryakin, and either give him a clean bill of health or send him back behind the Iron Curtain. But I don't want you rummaging about in people's dirty laundry baskets. A fellow could have any number of reasons for wishing to end it all, and frankly, since Black left no note explaining his actions, I think we should respect his wish for privacy."

"And suppose Kuryakin drove him to suicide?"

"Drove him to suicide?" echoed Sir John.

"Yes. There are more ways of killing a cat than buttering it with parsnips, you know. And it wouldn't be the first time the KGB have used this tactic. But that raises two questions: what were they blackmailing him _with_ , and what were they blackmailing him _for?"_

"I'm afraid I don't quite follow you."

"I'm sorry, I was thinking out loud again. Terrible habit. What I mean is, why would the KGB have wanted Black dead? And how did they persuade him to do it? It's got to have been blackmail of some kind."

"Blackmail," repeated Sir John in strangled tones, newspaper headlines dancing so visibly before his eyes that Wimsey could practically read them himself.

"He was a close friend of Alan Turing's, wasn't he?" he said casually.

Judging by Sir John's reaction, the Master had missed his true calling as a star of Christmas pantos. Many a Dame would have envied his magnificently goggle-eyed expression, not to mention the flapping jaw, as he absorbed the import of Peter's question.

"I say, Wimsey," he finally managed, "you can't be serious about this? I absolutely cannot have you making accusations like that. You'll throw the whole college into disrepute. I insist that you drop this line of enquiry. In fact, I rather think you'd better drop the whole thing. I wish I'd never asked you up here."

"Oh, I entirely see your point, Duffield," Wimsey assured him drily. "Better a live KGB officer on the premises than a dead Friend of Dorothy's. Only in this particular instance the two seem to be linked." 

"But even if that's true, I still don't see why you have to go about this as if it were a detective case," protested Sir John. "Can't you just put out feelers in the F.O. and see if there's anything about Kuryakin you can pick up on the grapevine?"

"I could," agreed Peter, "and, as a matter of fact, I have. But I'm afraid that if you didn't want this gone about as if it were a detective case, then you shouldn't have roped in Yours Truly. I'm quite incorrigible in that respect. And there is always the possibility, is there not, that the fellow might be a KGB officer and yet innocent of this particular crime?"

"Frankly," said Sir John, tight-voiced, "I am past the point of caring about such niceties. If he's working for the KGB I want him out of my College, whether he did Black in or not. The fellow's a ticking bomb, and whether he went off this time, or goes off in six months, is beside the point."

"And if he's not KGB?"

"I thought you'd established he was?"

"Not exactly."

"And what does that mean?"

"There's a question mark in his file, but it appears to go back to an anonymous source, albeit an anonymous source with rather better connections to the F.O. than our friendly letter writer. He could still be the victim of a smear campaign. Possibly even one initiated by the Soviets. He hasn't made any noises about defecting, has he? I'm told he's a gifted scientist."

"Damn you, Wimsey, I should never have dragged you into this. All right, you can have a look around Black's room. But for God's sake, if you do find anything, I'm relying on your discretion. I will not have rumours of untoward doings in the college cloisters voiced outside this, er, corridor. In fact, we'd better go and do it now, while everyone else is at tea."

Compared with Sir Edward Fawsley's luxurious Trinity pad, Black's set was tiny, and whatever his secret habits might have been, his tastes in furnishings ran to the Spartan rather than the decadent. 

"So," said Wimsey, casting a Holmesian eye around the premises, "this is the fox's earth, eh? Hardly the style to which I would wish to become accustomed. Are all the Fellows' sets this cramped, Duffers?"

"It's not cramped, it's _bijou_ ," objected Sir John. "Small but perfectly formed. No ostentatious monstrosities for Christ's, thank you very much. We leave that sort of thing to St John's."

"Absolutely," said Wimsey, hastening to smooth the Master's ruffled pride. "And I daresay it would all look very much cosier if the furnishings were a little less _petit bourgeois_. That sofa should be spending its declining years in the Home for Retired Soft Furnishings, for a start. And yet it fits, somehow. Dr Black, we note, was a man who placed little value on worldly things. Observe the positioning of the desk, placed so as to dominate the room, yet away from the distractions offered by the window. No watching the undergrads lounge on the grass of Second Court for Black! His mind is focused upon higher things. No cheap novels wink at him from the shelves, no potted plants tempt him with thoughts of the world outside his window. And yet the material plane inflicts itself upon his attention. He likes to have things just so. Behold the ink pot and blotter, arranged with an eye to symmetry. Behold the absence of clutter. When he has finished working, his papers are not left spread about his desk but neatly filed away in this cabinet here. Even on the night he kills himself, he ensures that all is orderly. I see from the twin coasters on the coffee table that he does occasionally entertain at least one friend. And there is an armchair, albeit _sans_ cushion. Gosh, that's hard. The guest must sit on the sofa. What do they drink, Dr Black and his chum? Something from this cabinet, I take it, poured into the appropriate specimen from this collection of glasses. Certainly a man who ensures his ink pot is positioned so precisely could never be at ease drinking white wine from a red wine glass. And what do his tastes run to? Oh dear, cheap plonk, sweet sherry and blended whisky. I am beginning to develop a decided distaste for Dr Black. Hullo, what's this? Vodka? Now that's rather curious. I thought our man was a Red-baiter? What's he doing supporting the Soviet economy?"

"Man," said the Master philosophically, "is an irrational and inconsistent creature. I myself am very fond of _pinot noir_ , although I cannot abide the French. No, don't start on me, Flim. A man of my age must be allowed his eccentricities."

"You're quite right," agreed Wimsey. "Of course there's no _a priori_ reason why a dyed-in-the-wool Tory shouldn't develop a taste for vodka, though one rather wonders how it came to pass. I deduce from the fact that it has yet to be opened that it wasn't his favourite tipple. That honour clearly goes," - here he gave a delicate shudder - "to the Australian _cabernet sauvignon_. Bunter mine, take this politically suspect bottle and dust it for pawprints, would you? Oi, Duffers, don't go touching anything! You'll mess up the results! Don't you see how Bunter's using his handkerchief to pick up the evidence?"

"Sorry, sorry," said Sir John hastily, snatching back his hands as if he had been burned. "Dear me, are you going to take prints off everything in this room? I can't see what good it will do you. I can't possibly allow you to fingerprint the entire College as if we were a collection of criminals. And what on earth does your man want with ashes from the fireplace?"

"You let me worry about that," said Wimsey. "Now then, before we turn our attention to the contents of this very tempting-looking filing cabinet, what's through here? The bedroom? Bless me, it's even smaller than the sitting room. And almost as sparsely furnished. Itym, one bed, single. Foam pillow and scratchy brown blankets. Itym, one cupboard, no doubt full of hair shirts. Well, horrible tweed suits, anyway, which is much the same thing. Anything in the pockets? Hmm, a box of matches, three copper coins and a penknife. No letters from Addenbrooke's hospital, unfortunately. And here we have a pair of exceedingly elderly Italian shoes, size 43, presumably a hangover from Black's wild days at King's. And that's it. Not even a bedside table, or a lamp to read in bed by. A man of principle, of dedication to the life of the mind, who denies himself even the smallest of luxuries. He sounds as if he was the most frightful bore."

"You should have been a psychologist," said Duffield admiringly. "That's Black to a T. Nasty little man, to my mind. Always thought he was better than everyone else, because all he ever did was work. Did you know he went to a grammar school? I always thought that accounted for the smell of small-mindedness and boiled cabbage about him. Though he was a fine scholar, of course. Now, what about that filing cabinet, if you've quite finished in here?"

"Ah yes, the filing cabinet. Hmm, not locked. That's hardly a feature of a repository of lethal secrets, is it? Still, no stone unturned and all that. Goodness me, what a pile of papers. These academics, always scribble scribble scribble. Still, at least they're efficiently filed. Lecture notes, Governing Body meetings, conferences… ah, private correspondence, that's a likely candidate. Plonk yourself down on the sofa, Bunter, this is going to take a while. But you needn't read the whole file, just do a quick pass through for anything that looks like a suicide note."

"I'll do the private correspondence," said Sir John firmly, settling himself in the armchair. "If anyone's going to sniff around his private papers, it should be a colleague. Good Lord, this is uncomfortable. I think you might be right about those hair shirts. Don't look at me like that, Wimsey, I promise I shall let you have a shuftie at anything that might be relevant to your inquiry - oh, I say, the file's completely empty! Hang on a minute, is that why you want to examine the ashes, to see if he burned anything? By Jove, that's rather cunning of you."

"Cunningness is my watchword," said Peter. "If Private Correspondence is empty, you can have Gov. Bod. At least you'll know if he's saved every minute, or just stuff relating to specific issues."

Other than this initial revelation, the pass through the papers turned up nothing untoward, the contents of the files proving to be exactly as stated on the labels. Sir John gave forceful expression to his opinion of the inconsiderateness of people who, upon committing suicide, were sufficiently well-organised to burn their correspondence but unwilling to leave suicide notes, thereby causing other people to leap to all manner of unwarranted conclusions, not to mention forcing them to spend hours sifting through piles of tedious papers. He also gave tangential vent to his disappointment at the lack of correspondence relating to terminal cancer, an idea which had seized his imagination as a most happy way of extricating his College from its current predicament. Lord Peter, by contrast, was exceedingly satisfied with the results of his reading session, and was looking forward to a meeting of minds with Bunter on the subject, as soon as they could get rid of Sir John.


	10. IN STEVENSON AGAIN

"Did anything strike you as odd?" said Lord Peter to Bunter, when they had returned to their quarters.

"Apart from the absence of shot glasses, my lord? I did wonder if Dr Black had had his lecture notes typed up by a secretary, since only the mathematical symbols were handwritten."

"Aha, so you noticed the lack of a typewriter," said Wimsey. "You know, under other circs this would be a frightfully jolly little investigation. All the evidence is in the absence - no suicide note, no fingerprints, no shot glasses, no typewriter, no private correspondence. What's your interpretation of the missing typewriter?"

"On general principles it seems plausible that it was removed because of fears that a document Dr Black produced on that typewriter could be traced back to it."

"It seems superficially plausible, I grant you, but it's really rather odd. Why wouldn't Black have signed anything he wrote on the typewriter? No, it must have been something written by the murderer, though why he felt the need to sit down and compose a damning document on his victim's typewriter is beyond my imagining. Fawsley's right, I fear. Time like an ever-rolling stream bears all his sons away, including the old grey matter. Well, put it on the list of puzzles. Let's turn to the evidence of the fireplace. How long till you can get those ashes analysed?" 

"It will take a while, my lord, since I must first purchase the necessary chemicals, but purely from their appearance I should say that they are composed largely of paper rather than wood."

"Splendid. That just leaves the question of whether Black did the burning, or whether it was the murderer. If it was the latter, he must be an ice-cool sort of bloke. Can you imagine sitting here, peacefully smoking a fag and sorting through the files, while all that uproar with ambulances and corpses and whatnot goes on around you? He'd have to have nerves of steel."

"It seems to me, my lord, if I may venture an opinion, that given Dr Black's proclivities, he had excellent reason not to wish his private correspondence to be read after his death by third parties."

"I know it's your job to stick up for suicide, Bunter, but do you have to do it with such tenacity?" protested Wimsey. "I concede that the burning may just have been a sensible precaution on Black's part, but what about that vodka, eh? Glasses for all different kinds of drinks, including whiskey, but no shot glasses. That suggests the vodka-imbibing murderer brought it with him."

"It did occur to me, my lord, that it might have been purchased _for_ Mr Kuryakin rather than brought here _by_ him."

"What?" It was not often that Lord Peter Wimsey was astonished, not at his advanced years, but it was true that if anyone could pull that feat off, it was Bunter. 

"Explain!" he demanded.

"Dr Black is known to have invited Mr Kuryakin for drinks, repeatedly, and with a persistency that required considerable inventiveness in producing excuses." Bunter looked at his master with an expression that invited him to draw an obvious conclusion. When Wimsey refused to oblige him, Bunter shifted uneasily in his seat. "You agreed, my lord, that Dr Black had good reason to wish to burn his personal correspondence," he said unhappily.

"Yes?" said Wimsey, still looking blank. Bunter very nearly groaned aloud. 

"Mr Kuryakin is a very, er, athletic young man," he said, in an agony of embarrassment. "To a certain kind of mind, he might appear, ah, er... that is to say, an invitation to drinks might be a prelude to..."

"I say, Bunter," said Wimsey, thunderstruck, "You're not suggesting Kuryakin and Black..."

"No, my lord, quite the contrary," said Bunter, with unspeakable relief that he need hint no further. "There is no indication whatsoever that Mr Kuryakin returned the sentiment. Dr Black, on the other hand..."

"It's possible," said Wimsey, musingly. "But then there's his well-known dislike of all things Soviet."

"I would venture to suggest, my lord, that the passions of the heart are as irrational as the passions of the palate. Think of Mr Kuryakin as a bottle of _pinot noir_."

"You may have a point," said Wimsey thoughtfully. "In fact, I'm sure you do. But it still requires a huge speculative leap. Evidence, Bunter, where is the evidence?"

The question had been intended as pure rhetoric, a fact of which Bunter was well aware. Nonetheless, he produced in response an envelope from his packet. This he handed over to his employer with something that, in any other man, would have looked very like a flourish.

"I found this in Dr Black's fireplace, my lord."

Peter fell upon the contents like Lord Byron upon a chambermaid.

"A fag end! In fact, on close inspection, I should say the butt of a Turkish cigarette. Good God, so it wasn't the Poison Pen lurking underneath Kuryakin's window, it was Black. No, hang on a mo, Bunter, this won't wash. You're not going to tell me that a chap like Black, who was pathologically tidy-minded, habitually chucked his cigarette butts into the fireplace? There were no ashtrays in his set, you know."

"He may have preferred to avoid smoking in his rooms, my lord. He did, after all, carry matches around with him. It is possible that on the evening he died, the mental distress of burning his papers led him to break that habit. The footprints in the shrubbery, you will recall, were size eight and a half, and the shoes in Dr Black's cupboard are the equivalent continental size. This would explain both the vodka and the cigarette butts without requiring that we multiply the entities, my lord."

Peter frowned. "But if the connection between Black and Kuryakin is purely personal, and has nothing to do with the KGB, then why was Kuryakin trying to fillet Turing's files?"

"It is possible," said Bunter, who had given a great deal of thought to this very issue, "that there is no connection between Turing and Black. Perhaps Mr Kuryakin's research is not going well and he was seeking fresh inspiration."

"Plagiarism, eh? I don't deny that would account for the midnight raid, although that would require a coincidence, and my faith in coincidences is non-existent. Besides, I can't see what computing engines, or botany, have to do with quantum mechanics. Nevertheless, let us see if we can reconstruct the events surrounding Black's death on the assumption that Kuryakin was attempting to plagiarise Turing, and therefore that the KGB are not involved." Wimsey paused for a moment, as in uncertain where exactly to start, and then plunged in. "Black, let us assume, develops a seething passion for our Soviet friend. Hate, after all, is very close to love. He argues politics with him, finds himself both attracted and repelled, makes overtures and is rebuffed. He lurks outside Kuryakin's window, smoking and suffering and straining for a glimpse of the object of his affection. In a cloud of despair he burns his papers and shoots himself. There is no murderer, and no espionage, and Christ's is cleared of any scandal. But where does that leave the anonymous letter? If Black was the Lurker, then how on earth did the Poison Pen get the idea that Kuryakin was involved in Black's death? No, don't tell me the letter was just a nasty attempt at mud-throwing, that means we're saying both the letter _and_ the files aren't pieces of the puzzle, and that's more coincidence than I can stomach, however many improbable things I try to believe before breakfast. Besides, why was the pistol wiped clean of prints? And why was Black's typewriter swiped? It just doesn't hang together." 

He shook his head regretfully, but then his eyes brightened. "Well then, let's try a different tack. Black makes a pass at Kuryakin and is rejected. Black, however won't take no for an answer. He keeps pursuing Kuryakin and threatens to expose him as a KGB sleeper if he doesn't submit to his desires. In despair, Kuryakin borrows Milton's pistol from the SCR and shoots Black, wipes off his own prints, adds Black's, and then destroys his papers. That's rather wonderfully melodramatic, but it won't wash. Kuryakin was at Formal Hall when the shot was fired, and anyway, he couldn't have got into Black's set without a key. Unless Black gave him one. Gosh, there's a thought. Suppose Kuryakin was blackmailing Black, rather than the other way round? Suppose he didn't reject his advances, but accepted them with a view to blackmailing him into helping the Soviets get their hands on Turing's research? No, Bunter, I insist you let me incorporate the KGB into this, even if it does mean multiplying the entities. Under the threat of exposure, Black tells Kuryakin all he can about Turing's work, then, overcome with shame, he shoots himself. Kuryakin, having the key to Black's set, lets himself in and removes any evidence, including the suicide note and the typewriter on which it was written. Bingo! Now all he has to do is find the relevant papers in Turing's files, hence the midnight raids."

"And the anonymous letter, my lord?"

"Dammit, that's the one piece of the puzzle I can't fit in. Someone must have known what was going on, but in that case why frame the accusation in such general terms? Why not go straight to the police? I don't like it, Bunter. Something's missing. And there's something else bothering me too, something Fawsley said about Turing, but I'm so abominably out of practice I'm damned if I know what it is. All I know is that it's niggling at me, and I do so hate being niggled. It makes me all jumpy, as if the frightful fiend was treading close behind me, except no matter how often I turn my head, there's no-one there. We need to look at those files, even if all we find is empty air. There's something I know about them that doesn't jibe with what Fawsley said, and perhaps having a peek will jog my memory.

"Very good, my lord. Shall I enquire of Sir John Duffield's secretary if he will be available to accompany us this evening?"

Peter glanced at him sharply. "What's that?" he said.

"Sir John Duffield," repeated Bunter. "Professor Fawsley suggested that we draw on his expertise in interpreting the significance of Dr Turing's work, my lord."

"He did, didn't he?" said Peter slowly. "Now why is that part of the niggle? It's got something to do with cricket, I'm sure. What's the association? Googlies? Pimm's?" For a moment he stared into space, pursuing the elusive memory. Then his face changed. "Duffers!" he said. "Fawsley said Duffield ought to look at the files because he'd worked on Fibonacci numbers. But when I asked Duffers about Black's research he said number theory wasn't his field. Why would he lie to me about that?"

The question was clearly rhetorical and, like all good pieces of rhetoric, it was highly effective. Bunter felt a bolt of mental electricity galvanise his thought processes into action. Before he could speak, however, Wimsey was off again, the ideas coming almost faster than he could articulate them.

"Fawsley must be telling the truth. He said Duffield presented his research to the Royal Society, which means it's a matter of public record. We can check that at any time. And if this is the work that got him elected a Fellow of the Society then that gives us a motive straight off – it isn't Kuryakin who's plagiarising Turing, it's Duffield. Presumably that means he couldn't get elected off his own bat; I wonder if the quality of his work has taken a nosedive in recent years? It would be easy to check that too. But, I hear you ask, if Kuryakin wasn't trying to plagiarise them, what was he doing trying to pinch Turing's files?"

"It is possible that Mr Kuryakin had been told of Sir John's activities, and wished to ascertain whether the allegation of plagiarism was correct," suggested Bunter, this being exactly the action he would have taken under similar circumstances.

"Blast you, Bunter, that was supposed to be my big revelation," grumbled Peter. "I wish you'd just sit there and look thunderstruck with admiration, instead of having it all worked out before me. No, no need to apologise, Dr Watson, I shall let you play Holmes for once. Step forth into the limelight and tell me how you think Kuryakin got wind of Duffield's unspeakable activities."

"I believe Dr Black informed him, my lord. The young gentleman who captains the Cricket Club did say Dr Black had been very keen to speak to Mr Kuryakin in the week before his death."

"I don't know why they say two heads are better than one; I'm beginning to get the impression that ours share but a single brain between them. Black must have realised that Duffield had ripped off Turing when he read Duffield's Royal Society paper, and then he went and spilled the beans to Kuryakin."

"And why did he choose Mr Kuryakin to confide in, my lord?"

"Don't you know? I thought you were the one who spotted Black's, um, attachment. Fawsley did say Black was a bit of a coward. My guess is he was too frightened to confront Duffield directly, so he asked young Kuryakin to do it for him. I daresay he'd built him up a bit in his mind - all those long hours lurking outside his window, smoking and dreaming, you know. A young Apollo, golden-haired. A knight in shining armour. An athlete. A ruthless Red, frightened of nothing. About as different from poor Black as anyone could get, in fact. Just the chap to take on the forces of darkness and extract vengeance. It does make sense in a way. And then Duffers finds out and bang! Black is found dead and Kuryakin is carted off back to the Motherland, where he spends the next few years incarcerated in a Siberian work camp for blowing his assignment. At least, I imagine that was what was supposed to happen, when Duffield's old chum from the Foreign Office made a few behind-the-scenes enquiries and discovered there was a query on Kuryakin's file. A nice quiet repatriation to avoid a College scandal, and no questions asked. No wonder the boy didn't like the look of my face. Have I ever mentioned, Bunter, how much I dislike being used?"

Bunter, observing a familiar shadow passing across Lord Peter's face, hastened to ask a question.

"Are you implying that Sir John Duffield murdered Dr Black, my lord?"

"No," said Wimsey slowly. "I don't think he can have done, at least not directly. He was at Founder's Dinner when Black died, remember? But I'm not sure he didn't have a hand in it just the same. He knew Black was terrified of being exposed as a homosexual. He had access to the SCR, where the pistols were kept. And he had a key to the cellar where the fireworks were being stored for the May Ball, so he could lay his hands on gunpowder without any inconvenient visits to the chemist's. He may have offered the pistol to Black as a way out. You know, Bunter, I think it's time we had a chat with Mr Kuryakin. And I'd rather not do it on College premises – walls have ears, and all that. What do you suppose the odds are that our enterprising Ruskie will have another crack at Turing's files tonight?"


	11. OUTSIDE THE CAVENDISH LABORATORY

It was a foul night. The clouds that had chivvied Lord Peter on his way back from Trinity swelled still more ominously as evening approached, and shortly before midnight they let down their burden with a savage fervour. Peter and Bunter huddled in the car outside the Cavendish Lab, watching the windscreen wipers bow and straighten, like tipsy gentlemen in frock coats, to a hypnotic rhythm at odds with the African drums of the rain. At each passage, a brief window opened in the distorting stream of water, and they peered anxiously through in search of their quarry, although, as Peter observed, the chances were he would have chosen an early night in preference to wetting his wings from ranging in the rain. "Which is," he added, "a jolly good principle, and it is only my extreme devotion to duty that is keeping me here in this tin box in the middle of the most dreadful downpour it has been my misfortune to experience. The rain it raineth on the just, and also on the unjust fellow, but chiefly on the just because the unjust is safely tucked up in bed awaiting more favourable weather conditions."

At around one in the morning, however, the rain eased off, exhausted by its orgy, and after approximately the amount of time it would take to shin down a stretch of ivy, scramble over a wall and cycle from Christ's to the Cavendish, a single light came gliding towards them from around the corner of Downing Street.

As the bike approached, Peter switched on the headlights and Free School Lane lit up like a stage. The cyclist flung up one hand to shield his eyes from the glare, and braked sharply, then yanked the front wheel around, with the evident idea of fleeing back the way he had come. His foot was already depressing the pedal, when the hand of Bunter fell heavily upon his shoulder, and the voice of Lord Peter fluted through the raindrops.

"Why don't you get in the car, Mr Kuryakin? It's a vile night, and we'd be happy to give you a lift."

Kuryakin bestowed on his lordship a look of indescribable sullenness, and hesitated, as if considering his options. Apparently he concluded that he had none, for, although his face did not change, he turned to the door Wimsey was holding open for him and wriggled into the passenger seat.

"That's the ticket," said Wimsey cheerfully. "You hop in the back, Bunter, and we'll go for a spin. Dear me, we're just in time, it looks as if the rain is starting up again. Now then, Kuryakin, I expect you're wondering what an eccentric old duffer like me wants from a young scientist like yourself."

"I can guess," said that gentleman grimly.

"Oh, you can, can you?" said Wimsey. "I'd be rather surprised if that's true, but I'll tell you what, I'll give you three tries, in the approved fairy tale manner. If you get it right, Cinders, you shall go to the ball."

"And if I don't?" said Kuryakin, staring fixedly out of the side window.

"Well, if you don't, then I suppose I shall have to tell you. Don't worry, you won't be turned into a pumpkin or anything, I'll just be rather impressed if you do guess correctly, because I'm inclined to think you're probably barking up the wrong tree. I'll tell you what, let me make three guesses first, and then you can have yours. Dr Black contacted you before he died, didn't he?"

Kuryakin stiffened perceptibly but said nothing.

"It's all right," said Lord Peter easily. "You have the right to remain silent, but anything you do say will not be taken down and used against you. Now for guess number two: Black accused Sir John Duffield of ripping off Alan Turing's research and publishing it as his own. I see from the frown and wrinkled lip that I've hit another jackpot, so you needn't break your silence on my account. Guess number three: you think I'm here to institute a cover-up on Sir John's behalf, the pillars of the Establishment standing shoulder to shoulder to defend their own, my country right or wrong. But actually nothing could be further from the truth. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. I will concede that Sir John did ask me, in a roundabout sort of way, to get your residence permit revoked and pack you off back to Mother Russia – and I'd like to know exactly what you did to arouse his suspicions – but unfortunately for him, I'm more a detective sort of bloke than a politician. I did a bit of snooping around and found out rather more than I was supposed to."

He glanced sideways at the young man, who was still staring rigidly out of the window, the personification of scepticism.

"I'm not going to let him get away with it," Wimsey said softly.

The Allegory of Scepticism did not soften in the slightest. Lord Peter felt a curl of irritation.

"Look, I tell you, I'm not involved in this in any official capacity. Whether you help me out or not, nothing's going to happen to you. But it would make it very much easier to put Duffield in check if you could see your way to telling me exactly what Black told you."

In answer to this, Kuryakin glanced down at the door handle, then his head swivelled round towards the imposing bulk of Bunter in the back seat. For a moment his eyes flickered back and forth between Bunter and the door, and then, with the air of a political martyr submitting to the secret police, he put his hand inside his jacket pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. This he passed to Wimsey, all the while carefully avoiding looking at him, in a very thorough and deliberate snub. Peter unfolded the paper and read the contents aloud for Bunter's benefit, noting, by way of introduction, that the letter was typewritten.

_27 May 1955_

_My dear Illya,_

_Pardon me for taking the liberty of writing to you like this, but I do not know where else to turn. By the time you read this letter, I shall have crossed into that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns, and perhaps the world will be a better place for it; I cannot honestly say that anyone but my dear Mother will regret my passing._

_If you had not been careful to avoid me this past week – I know you were, you need not trouble to deny it – I should have told you the full story. Or perhaps I am just fooling myself. I like to believe that you would have understood, but perhaps you would have felt no more than contempt or, worse, pity. That I could not have endured. But I must get to the point._

_Please understand that what I am about to tell you is in no way the result of personal animosity towards Sir John Duffield. It is true that I opposed his appointment as Master. I believed then, and I now know, that his values are antithetical to this institution. Science can only be truly served in a spirit of humility, of selfless dedication to theory and fact, and not as a means of personal advancement. I have no doubt that Sir John will "raise the standing" of this College. As to what he will raise it to, that, I fear, is less certain. He is – I must speak plainly – a liar, a cheat and a thief, without honour, without scruples and without morals._

_I wish you could have known Cambridge as it once was. When I was a young man, it was a place dedicated to ideals: ideals of friendship, of scholarship, of love. Nowadays it seems treachery, greed and self-advancement are the guiding principles, and it is men like Sir John who have brought us to this state._

  
_It has been my misfortune to stumble across evidence of exactly how low he will stoop to achieve his ends, but when I confronted him with this, I found myself outplayed. I cannot explain myself more fully, I can only ask you to take it on trust that I would not have abandoned this crusade had my hand not been forced._

  
_You will have heard, I am sure, of Alan Turing. You will also have heard what happened to him - the whole world has. After his disgrace, he contacted me to ask my assistance with some research he was pursuing, and for the sake of our long-standing friendship, I agreed. I was naturally reluctant that knowledge of this association should reach other ears, and Alan was very much in a mood to retreat from the world; besides which, the topic - the development of cryptographic algorithms for computing engines - touched on areas that he had been legally prohibited from pursuing. I am certain, given these circumstances, that no-one beside ourselves was aware of the work we were doing. I repeat, no-one knew of this work. Yet shortly after Alan's death, Sir John Duffield delivered an important paper on exactly this topic to the Royal Society, on the strength of which he was elected a Fellow. I have procured a copy of this paper and satisfied myself that there is no element of it which is original. It is all drawn directly from work Alan Turing did, with some minor input from myself, in the autumn of 1953._

_You will forgive a condemned man a brief descent into melodrama, but this cancer at the heart of Christ's must be cut out. Expose the scandal to the world, and it will destroy the perpetrator, as all things of darkness shrivel and die when they are exposed to the light. I cannot do it. You must believe me when I tell you that Sir John Duffield is as guilty of my death as if he had pulled the trigger himself. All hope of justice rests now with you, Illya. I swear I am telling the truth and I shall seal that oath with my blood._

_Yours etc._

_Gregory Black_

"So you were invited to apply for the job of avenging angel," said Wimsey, when he had finished reading this curious missive. "How did the invitation arrive, by the way?"

"I found it in my pigeonhole the morning after he died," said Kuryakin. "It must have come in the university mail."

"And what did you think of it?"

"I didn't know what to think. It seemed so utterly bizarre."

"It didn't occur to you he might simply be off his rocker?"

"It did cross my mind. But if he was mad, he must have gone insane very suddenly, because I'd talked to him on several occasions and he always seemed very rational. Not very pleasant, but rational. And then, he was actually dead, so that part at least was true."

"So that meant you felt obliged to do something?"

Kuryakin shrugged, in a rather French manner, as if to say this were far too complicated an issue to be addressed in mere language  
.  
"But you did do something?" persisted Peter, "Even though you didn't know Black well and had no idea if he was telling the truth? Rather selflessly noble of you."  
Kuryakin scowled at the street outside, but said nothing.

"I don't suppose," said Wimsey in frustration, "that you have any idea why he picked you?"

For the first time Kuryakin turned his head to look directly at him, his eyes blue and guileless. "It beats me," he said, the slang expression sitting oddly with his accent. "I thought he couldn't stand me. He started an argument every time we met."

There was a slightly strained silence. In the back seat, Bunter shifted uncomfortably but kept his counsel.

"And yet you took up the torch," said Wimsey at last. "Why? You must have had a reason."

Kuryakin hunched down in his seat. "I was curious," he said defensively, "so I got hold of a copy of Duffield's Royal Society paper, and it was true that it was a significant departure from his previous work."

Lord Peter nodded appreciatively, and Kuryakin, apparently encouraged, became more forthcoming. "After that I kept my eyes on him, to see if he showed any signs of a guilty conscience, and I think he must have noticed, because he started watching me back. I would look up from eating in Hall and find him staring at me. And once I came back from the Lab early, because I was feeling unwell, and met him coming down my staircase. I mean, he's the Master and he can go where he likes, but I know he wasn't visiting anyone else on the staircase, because all the oaks were sported, except Carruthers', and Carruthers said no-one had knocked on his door. That struck me as odd, but I didn't see what I could do about it, and anyway, it was hardly evidence of plagiarism. And then you turned up, and Duffield was so anxious to stress that you were his friend and that you worked for the intelligence services, and I remembered Black's letter, and that Duffield had had some sort of hold over him, and I was afraid he might have something similar in mind for me. So I thought I had better satisfy myself once and for all whether Dr Black had been speaking the truth, and I looked into Turing's files to see if there was anything corresponding to Duffield's paper."

"And there wasn't, of course," said Wimsey, "but there were great big gaps in the files. And that struck you as suspicious."

"Yes. But I couldn't get all the way through them in one night – there are boxes and boxes of the things – so I came back to have another look. And you caught me."

He cast a sideways look at Lord Peter, as if to see how he was taking it. "What happens now?" he asked. "You said you weren't going to let Duffield get away with it. What do you have in mind?"

Lord Peter's long fingers tapped the steering wheel, producing a rhythm that the musically inclined might have recognised as the Radetzky March but which was, nonetheless, rather wearing on the nerves. "We need to find those files," he said thoughtfully. "It seems to me that a spot of law-breaking is called for. Oh, don't look so shocked, Kuryakin, we aren't going to inflict any damage on persons or property, but I should very much like to have a squint inside Duffers' private safe, and though I have friends in high places, I don't believe that under the circumstances any of them would oblige me with a search warrant. If we're going to do anything, it will have to be a private initiative. And you know, since heaven has thoughtfully provided us with an occasion when we can be certain the Master's Lodge will be unoccupied – the May Ball, you juggins - I think it would be rather ungrateful of us not to _carpe_ the _diem_."

"But we don't know where the safe is," objected Kuryakin.

"Ah, now that I think," said Lord Peter, indulging in a rare twinkle, "is a task for Bunter. Bunter, do you think you could employ your manly charms to prevail upon Duffield's housekeeper to reveal where the safe is?"

"Mrs Winterbottom?" said Bunter, a trifle doubtfully. "I should not like to lay odds on it, my lord. She strikes me, if you will excuse the expression, my lord, as a right old tartar. I fear she may prove unsusceptible to the blandishments of the male sex."

"A garden closed is my sister, my spouse? A spring shut up, a fountain sealed? But she must have succumbed at least once, you know. Surely you won't let yourself be outdone by Mr Winterbottom, May-He-Rest-In-Peace?"

"I shall endeavour as always to give your lordship satisfaction," returned Bunter grimly, and Peter smirked.

"In that case we may count on success," he said to Kuryakin. "You may not think it to look at him now, but Bunter was once the terror of Piccadilly. No housemaid was safe from him. Like Joshua, he blew his trumpet and down went all before him."

Here he broke off. Kuryakin was regarding Bunter with a dubious eye, as if uncertain how to categorise a man who preyed upon helpless female members of the proletariat. Peter sighed. Kuryakin was undoubtedly a worthy young man, but like all these blasted Bolshies, he was tiresomely lacking in a sense of humour.

"What about you?" he said. "Are you up for it?"

Kuryakin stared out of the car window at the streaming rain. It was hard to tell what he was thinking. Peter supposed he must at least be pondering the consequences to his scientific career if he should be caught attempting to burgle the Master's Lodge. Certainly he would be sent back to Russia, and what would happen to him then was anybody's guess. It struck Peter, somewhat belatedly, that it wasn't entirely fair to involve Kuryakin in a crusade where the stakes were so much higher for him than for anyone else. He had already taken a great deal of risk in going through Turing's files. Asking him to rifle Duffield's safe as well was going too far.

"I don't want you doing any of the actual breaking and entering," he said firmly. "Although I'd appreciate your help as a distraction, if that's all right with you."

"All right," said Kuryakin slowly. "What will it involve?"

"Good man," said Peter warmly. "Now tell me, do you have a dinner suit? I thought not. I'd lend you one of mine – you're about the right height – but I fear it would be rather tight across the shoulders. And my tummy, alas, isn't as trim as it once was. Duffers and I have that much in common. I think Bunter had better take you shopping tomorrow. No arguments –" as Kuryakin raised his voice in protest – "It's the May Ball tomorrow night, and we'd be fools to pass up such a God-given opportunity for burglary. But you can hardly mingle with the crowds looking as if you'd just escaped from Woolworth's. It's evening dress or nothing. Come on, you can swallow that Socialist pride for once in a good cause – in for a penny, in for a pound, if you'll forgive the capitalist metaphor. And now let's get out of this filthy rain and go home to bed. We can work out the details in comfort tomorrow."


	12. FROM THE PORTERS' LODGE TO THE MASTER'S LODGE

The following morning, Lord Peter awoke unusually early for a man who had spent half the previous night lurking in the cramped confines of an automobile. The prospect of infiltrating the May Ball with nefarious intent had filled him with an almost childish glee, and his brain was fizzing like an alka seltzer with ideas and plans. 

"No, my lord, I should most respectfully advise against it," said Bunter firmly to one particular scheme  
.  
"But you'd make a splendid gypsy hag," protested his lordship, unable to relinquish the hare once it had been started. "It's no more demeaning than doing music hall, you know. We'll get you set up in a little tent and you can read everyone's palms and predict absolutely dire futures for them (none of this 'You'll get a Third if you don't get your finger out,' I want some really apocalyptic stuff), and when Duffers comes in you can go all Macbeth on him – hail him as Master of Christ's, and Fellow of the Royal Society, and Nobel that shall be hereafter, and then say something about Turing and see if a ghastly consciousness doesn't cross his face."

"Perhaps, my lord, you would wish me to shake my gory locks at him and say he did it?"

"That's the spirit, Bunter. Though I don't know if that mightn't be pushing our luck; a bit obvious, don't you think? Still, who can tell what form a man's conscience might take when it's finally pricked into life. I recall a fellow at school who copied another chap's essay on Tacitus and was haunted for weeks by dreams in which a purple hippopotamus was trying to swallow him up. It broke him in the end, and he confessed all to the housemaster. It turned out he had one of those Wodehousian aunts of rigid moral virtue and Stalinesque demeanour, and it was she who was stalking his subconscious in the form of a rapacious hippo. I wonder what Duffield's conscience looks like? _Pace_ Sir Julian Freke, I am inclined to think we all have one, and Duffers certainly did once upon a time, or at least a fear of being found out, which may come to the same thing in the end. Who was that chap who said 'Shame is imagining that other people are watching what we do?' Rather hit the nail on the head, to my mind."

"Perhaps, my lord, we might find a less theatrical way of stimulating Sir John's dormant conscience? One that does not require the services of elderly gypsies?"

Lord Peter, recognising a rare note of desperation beneath Bunter's level tones, gave a wave of his hand and assented. There were, in any case, so many other plans to spin and to abandon that the loss of one more was not too hard a blow to bear. 

The strategy that was eventually hatched out, and approved by all parties, was devoid of any such ornamentation as fortune tellers and purple hippos, Lord Peter having observed, as his sense of exhilaration gradually wore off, that they should take a leaf out of the best murderers' books, and keep things as simple as possible. They would take advantage of the fireworks display at midnight, which was bound to draw all eyes heavenward, and most bodies into the Fellows' Garden, to nip into the Chapel and gain access to Duffield's lodgings via the turret staircase that led directly to the Master's bedroom. The door would undoubtedly be locked, but his lordship undertook to distract the Porter whilst Kuryakin helped himself to the big bunch of keys that was kept on the wall behind the Plodge counter. The task of acquiring a substitute set in order that the theft of the real ones not be noticed fell to Bunter. That left a long afternoon for Lord Peter to kick his heels and worry, but at last evening fell and he could devote himself to dressing, and then to mingling. 

The College, he found, had been transformed from a sombre seat of learning into a sort of fairyland, although the magic wand behind it was presumably the Bursar's. A ring of torches burned around the perfect circle of First Court lawn, and answering lights winked from the lanterns strung from the ancient guttering. The striped awnings of little booths, dotted here and there about the premises, announced the availability of nibbles and entertainment, whilst as many College staff as could be mustered stalked white-coated through the cheerful throng of undergraduates, proffering trays of champagne. A juggler had taken up position in the centre of Third Court, his twirling batons alight at each end, and a sword-swallower was astonishing little clusters of guests as they paused on their way through the archway of the Fellows' Building. 

There was music everywhere. From a stage erected in the Fellows' Garden a live band was boogying enthusiastically, whilst the Hall, more decorously, had become a temporary ballroom, with a chamber orchestra placed high on the balcony to allow room for the couples twirling and circling to the strains of its Viennese waltzes. Lord Peter, in search of a glass of something more bracing than champagne, almost fell over a string quartet tucked inside the entrance to the Buttery, and was assailed by a solo jazz saxophonist outside the Library, whilst the stairway to the SCR throbbed with the strange, haunting rumble of a didgeridoo. Everywhere young people laughed and danced and chattered and embraced, the girls' gowns a whirl of bright colours, the young men in gleaming white dress shirts and the occasional daring red bow tie. As the evening advanced they became more intoxicated, less aware of their surroundings and more inclined to bump against one and giggle in lieu of apology. 

The Duty Porters in the Plodge that night, Mr Croft and Mr Daley, were not especially surprised when Mr Kuryakin came in to check his pigeonhole. They had already chased out a number of young men and women who were convinced, in spite of official denials, that the Plodge must contain some secret delight – perhaps a small orchestra concealed behind the counter, or a magician tucked away in the darkest recesses, pulling rabbits from his hat – but Mr Kuryakin was known for his sober habits, and he, at least, was unlikely to serenade them with the most popular tunes from _The Pirates of Penzance._ They were, however, very much taken aback when Lord Peter Wimsey, popping in to find out whether there had been any telephone calls for him, and resplendent in coat tails and white tie, was suddenly taken very faint and had to be helped out into the fresh air. 

"Are you all right, my lord?" asked Mr Croft anxiously, assisting his lordship onto a bench, and "Shall I call for an ambulance, my lord?" enquired Mr Daley, who would under other circumstances have loosened the gentleman's white tie, but was uncertain if this was allowed with almost-Peers.

"No need, no need," said his lordship, wheezing slightly. "Just a dizzy spell. I suffer from 'em occasionally, you know." 

"A glass of water, then?" asked Croft, uneasy at the prospect of leaving the old gentleman – who might, after all, be in the throes of a heart attack – without medical attention. At that moment his grateful eye fell upon the figure of the Master, who was heading through First Court in search of the Dean. Observing the figures clustered around the gatehouse, he hurried over to them, and then stopped aghast on recognising Wimsey, who was now gasping really piteously.

"For heaven's sake, Flim, are you all right?" he said, bending over his old friend with anxious concern.

Wimsey wheezed at him.

"You've been overdoing it, old chap," said Duffield. "I'm sorry I ever asked you up here, all this running around investigating is too much at your age. I must insist you lay off it."

"You may be right," said Wimsey, looking him directly in the eye. "We're neither of us what we once were, are we?" 

Duffield stared back at him, a consciousness of something behind his eyes. "There's no turning the clock back, old man," he said eventually. "Do you think you can get up, if I give you a hand?"

"Of course I can," said Peter, struggling to his feet. "Dear me, my legs aren't what they used to be either. Oh, call back yesterday, bid time return. How do you cope with the process of decay, Duffers? You look as fit as ever. Mentally, I mean - there's no denying you've put on a bit of padding. Have you got a portrait of your brain in an attic somewhere?"

Duffield gave a rather unconvincing bark of laughter. "The brain is just another kind of muscle," he said. "If you exercise it regularly, it will keep in trim. Shall I walk you back to your rooms?"

"Very kind of you, but no thanks," said Lord Peter hastily, "I'm feelin' much better now. Just in need of a little sit-down, what? Think I might go and listen to that orchestra in the Hall. Bunter can attend me. I gave him the evenin' off, but he said he'd rather stay in with a good book. He's not as young as he once was, either. Toodle pip, Duffers. Enjoy the rest of your ball."

And with a wave of his cane he was off, his white scarf still visible in the gloom, where it caught the occasional gleam from the lanterns long after the rest of him had vanished. Duffield, gazing after him, failed to notice another shadow flit out from the Plodge and conceal itself in B staircase. He frowned, then shook his head and plunged off once more after the elusive Dean. The fireworks were about to start and someone had mislaid the taper.

When the stars of the first rocket exploded above the College, Wimsey and Bunter sprang into action. It was but the work of a moment to unlock the Chapel door. They flitted through, relocked it, and headed through the soft darkness of the nave towards the antechapel, Kuryakin tagging rather wistfully at their heels. The light from Peter's torch flickered across the black-and-white tiles, and gleamed for a moment on the gold and white of the altar as they made their way to the turret staircase.

"I'll keep watch," volunteered Kuryakin unexpectedly. 

Peter thought it most unlikely that they would be disturbed, but he understood the difficulty of tearing oneself away when there is an adventure in the offing, and gave his blessing. Kuryakin padded softly back to the door, like a dutiful watchdog, and Peter and Bunter began their ascent. The stone staircase wound so tightly around itself that, in spite of the torch, it was impossible to see more than one or two steps ahead.

"I feel," said Peter, "like David Balfour climbing the tower in the House of Shaws. There is a sense of disaster lurking around every corner. But I do not lose heart. I screw my courage to the sticking place, confident in the knowledge that the Bursar was bound to have noticed if some bloke had absconded with part of the staircase. Ah, here we are. Pass me the keys, would you, Bunter? Thanks. Oh blast it, I was right about disaster lurking. The bally thing's bolted on the inside. And he smote upon the door a second time, 'Is there anybody there?' he said. Though it would be dashed awkward if there were anybody there. I doubt if I could persuade them that we had come to sell them an encyclopaedia. Here's a sad ending to all our schemes. Why do people insist on being so overly thorough about domestic security?"

They returned disheartened down the winding staircase, much to the astonishment of Kuryakin, who had expected the adventure to take a good half hour at least.

"Bolted," said Lord Peter, in answer to the unspoken question. "One more triumph for devils and sorrow for angels. What do we do now?"

"Perhaps, my lord," suggested Bunter, "we could endeavour to gain access via the Hall?"

"We've been through that," said Peter mournfully. "It's too risky. I say, what about Lady Maggie's private window, though?" He swung the torch up towards the roof, and the light glittered on the leaded panes. "I'd be awfully surprised if Duffers had had that latch fixed already. It's worth a try, anyway. The first part's easy, if you give me a leg up past the panelling, and with a bit of luck I could grab hold of that crest there to pull on. Or I suppose I could have done twenty years ago. All right, Bunter you needn't look at me with that mother hen expression, I know my limitations. We shall have to think of another way in, though I'm dashed if I know what."

"I could do it," said Kuryakin.

"Could you, by Jove?" said Peter. "It'd be taking an awful risk, though. If we get caught, I've nothing to lose but my reputation, and I lost that years ago, but it would be a poor lookout for you."

Kuryakin shrugged. "In for a penny, in for a pound," he said.

Wimsey nodded approvingly. "Very well then, my lad, up you go. Give him a heave on the count of three, Bunter. One, two, three! Good lord, he's fast. Darwin's quite right, you know, we must be descended from monkeys, though it's a pity we mislaid the tail in the process, one would come in jolly handy right now. No, move your foot about two inches to the left, there's a sort of sconce thingy sticking out of the wall there. That's the ticket. Now if you grab that twiddly bit – wonder what it's meant to be? Can't be a gargoyle, surely? – Yes! Well done! And the latch _hasn't_ been repaired. Hm, it's just as well it's Kuryakin doin' the _bander log_ impression and not me, I'm not entirely sure I could have fitted through that window. Come on, Bunter, let's get up the stairs before he unbolts the door. Last one up does twenty sit-ups."

It took Kuryakin a while to find the door, hampered as he was by the lack of a torch and an unfamiliarity with the layout of the Master's private rooms, but it was not nearly as long as it seemed to the anxious waiters on the staircase. At last, though, they heard the scrape of bolts, and the door swung open. Crossing the threshold, the trinity of ne'er-do-wellers made their cautious way through the Master's bedroom and down the stairs into his library. Here Bunter had his moment of glory, for the redoubtable Mrs Winterbottom had confided in him, in the course of a discussion about the careless habits of titled employers, that Sir John Duffield had but the one safe and that not even properly concealed behind a picture, but blatantly on display in the library wall, with only the leaves of a _ficus benjamina_ to conceal it from prying eyes.

"A mere fig-leaf, indeed," said Wimsey, rubbing his hands in anticipation. "Nonetheless, it would be easier to work if we shunted it to one side. Oh, thanks awfully, Kuryakin. Bunter, the stethoscope, please. Now, find something to occupy yourselves with, my children, this will take a while."

It did indeed take a while. Bunter, in fact, was kept fully occupied directing the torch at the dial, whilst Kuryakin roamed the room uneasily, his face occasionally lit up by the green and red of a rocket or the strange golden glare of a Roman candle. From time to time he glanced over at Wimsey, who was crouched next to the safe, so absorbed in his task that he appeared to have grown part of the metal. Every so often his gloved fingers would twist the dial a couple of notches, and his entire body grow tense with concentration as he strained to hear the click of the tumblers.

It occurred to Kuryakin to wonder how an English aristocrat in the very opposite of distressed circumstances had acquired a mastery of safe-cracking, but he could not spare a great deal of attention for the mystery. Anxiety that the firework show would end, or the Master return to his lodgings unexpectedly, kept pressing itself upon his attention, and it was necessary to suppress a flinch every time a rocket exploded, or his own steps caused a floorboard to creak beneath the carpet. It was a huge relief when Wimsey exclaimed, "Got it, by Jove!" and straightened up, rubbing his back.

Once the code had been cracked, the safe gave up its secrets willingly. The door swung open at a touch and Wimsey reached in eagerly.

"What have we got here, then? These will be Turing's files, I hope. Swing the torch this way a bit, would you, Bunter? Good lord, what's this? It appears that we have solved the Mystery of the Missing Typewriter. Hang on a mo, I'll pull it out and we can all have a squint at it." 

The typewriter was duly laid on the floor, and all three bent eagerly over it.

"That certainly does clear up the mystery," said Wimsey with satisfaction. "Look at the platen. Black did write a suicide note after all – and being in a bit of a state, he failed to wind the paper through properly before he started."

Screwing the monocle into his eye he bent his face closer to the platen, frowning with the effort of making out the words.

"You have got what you wanted; I hope it turns to dust and ashes in your mouth. But do not be too proud. Death is not the end: "If there should follow a thousand swords to carry my bones away, belike the price of a jackal's meal were more than a thief could pay". Keep looking over your…"

"Keep looking over your what?" asked Kuryakin, staring intently at the platen.

"Shoulder, presumably. It breaks off there. Black must have realised the paper wasn't wound through. Well, no wonder Duffield was feeling paranoid. He must have spent sleepless nights wondering who Black had unburdened his heart to. And then he caught you giving him funny looks and decided discretion was the better part of valour."

"I can't make that out at all," objected Kuryakin. "The letters are too faint."

"Here, have a gander through this," offered Lord Peter, handing him the monocle. "Bit of a silly toy, I know, but you'd be surprised how often it comes in handy."  
Kuryakin took the monocle eagerly and held it up against his eye with no air of condescension or indication that he found the proceedings silly. It took him a moment or two to work out exactly how to scrunch up his brow so that it stayed in place, but once it was secure he bent over the typewriter and let out a low whistle of surprise.

"It's very powerful…" he was saying appreciatively, when the door swung open and a beam of light cut through the room. Peter and Bunter, shrouded in shadow, could just make out the face of Sir John Duffield behind the torch, but Kuryakin, in the centre of the beam, was lit up like an actor in a follow spot, his eyes screwed up against the light, his pale hair suddenly afire above the black of his evening dress. At the sight of him, Sir John let out a gasp.

"Flim!" he said, his voice faint with horror, and the beam of light wavered in his hands. The young man at the centre of the circle froze for a moment, then straightened up with a jerk, as an expression of arrogant condescension took possession of his face. "For God's sake, Duffers," he snapped, in the clipped, precise tones of the English aristocracy. "You didn't really think you'd get away with it?"

Sir John opened his mouth as if to speak, then staggered suddenly. The torch fell from his hands, bounced once and went out. Bunter, leaping across the room at a speed astonishing in a man of his years, caught him as he sank to the floor.

"I fear he is having a heart attack, my lord," he called into the darkness. "Might I ask you to ring for an ambulance?"


	13. AT ADDENBROOKE'S HOSPITAL

Lord Peter, who had accompanied Sir John in the ambulance, loitered in the corridor at Addenbrooke's hospital while the doctors attended to the patient. The attack, though severe, had not been fatal, and at last his patience was rewarded when he was approached by a Matron, whose uniform was so stiff with starch, and whose aspect so forbidding, that a lesser man might have quailed. Wimsey, confident that there was no alcohol on his breath, and that the rumples in his evening dress had been earned in the service of virtue, was unintimidated, and as the Matron drew nearer he was rewarded by a prim smile. 

"Lord Peter Wimsey? Sir John is asking for you. We wouldn't normally allow visitors at this hour," – it was remarkable how a whole world of disapproval could be conveyed in a single sniff – "but he's working himself into a state demanding to see you, and any kind of excitement could be very dangerous in his condition. He was extremely lucky, you know. The outcome would have been very different had he not had friends on the spot to administer first aid. Please don't let him get excited, and keep your visit short."

Duffield was propped up against a heap of pillows, his face waxy and strained.

"I suppose it's all up, Flim?" he said hoarsely. "Are you really going to expose me to the world as a plagiarist? We go back a long way, old man. We were good friends at school."

"I hope you're not trying to appeal to my better nature, Duffield, because I don't have one," said Wimsey, embarrassed by this frontal assault. "What happened to you? You were always an arrogant hound, but you never stooped to cheating."

Duffield groaned. "I never needed to," he said. "I thought you understood what it's like, Wimsey, to feel your powers fading. The ideas simply wouldn't come, not like they used to. I sat up over my desk at night, cudgelling my brains to porridge, but it made no difference. All I could produce was solid, workmanlike stuff, worthy but dull, the sort of thing that gets a candidate a Lower Second. And I have never been the Lower Second type."

"So you had a look through Turing's files and found exactly what you needed."

"You needn't look at me," said Duffield, "as I were if some particularly revolting species of slug. Turing's dead; he didn't lose anything by it. Frankly, I did science a service by making his ideas widely available. These computing engines are really something, Flim. They're going to transform the way we think about intelligence."

"It played no role, of course, that you were on the verge of fulfilling all your worldly ambitions? Master of a Cambridge College, Fellow of the Royal Society…"

"Blast you, of course it did. But you're hardly in a position to sneer at the rewards of fame and fortune, with your fancy title and your ancestral pile."

"I don't have blood on my hands, though," said Wimsey, mindful of the Matron's orders, but choosing to disregard them. "You seem to have justified intellectual dishonesty to your own satisfaction, but can you justify murder?" 

Sir John's face darkened. "Don't be ridiculous, Wimsey," he said. "You can't pin Black's death on me. He took his own life freely."

"Because you threatened to expose him as a homosexual."

"He tried to blackmail me," protested Duffield. "He collared me in the Fellows' Garden and told me he was going to write to the Royal Society. What was I supposed to do? Give in to him? I told him that now he had revealed his true colours, I no longer had any reason to shield him, and that I was going to inform the police about his activities with certain of our undergraduates. That took the wind out of his sails, I can tell you. He practically grovelled at my feet. You can't call it murder, it was merely a _quid pro quo._ He threatened to destroy my reputation and I threatened to destroy his."

"If that's the case, then why did he kill himself? Why not simply drop his accusations?"

Duffield closed his eyes. "You have to understand that I was terrified," he said at last. "One word from him and I would have lost everything. Not just the Mastership and the FRS, but my good name as a scientist. Everything. I suppose I panicked. I knew that even if he backed down this time, I'd always have him hanging over me, like a sort of Board School Sword of Damocles. One day something might have given him that burst of courage he needed to live up to his middle class morality, and I didn't fancy living off my nerves every time we disagreed about expenditure for the May Ball or the Chairmanship of the Garden Committee. And I was angry, too, I admit. It was sickening to hear that little hypocrite prate about "standards" and "honour", when I knew full well what his own habits were. So I offered him an honourable way out of his dilemma."

"Very generous of you. How exactly did you phrase this offer?" said Wimsey. Sir John reddened.

"All right, I may have been rather blunt," he conceded. "But I was thinking on my feet. I swiped one of the pistols from the SCR for him and told him that if he was still alive after Founder's Dinner, I was going to the police."

"Hence the lack of prints on the weapon."

"Yes, I was rather proud of myself for thinking of that. Though of course you immediately spotted a problem with it."

"More than one," said Wimsey. "As a matter of fact, it was the lack of prints that made me realise someone must have had a reason for concealing their own handling of the gun."

Duffield groaned. "I always was too clever by half," he said. "I misjudged you, too. I thought you'd given up detecting years ago, and anyway, I couldn't see how you could possibly forge a link between me and Black."

"You were taking an awful risk, though, even by your standards. What if Black had decided to send a letter to the Royal Society before topping himself? After all, he had nothing to lose once he was dead."

"Oh, come on, Wimsey, you can't tell me you'd be perfectly happy to have people trample your name in the street after you were dead? Black may not have been in the same league as Pascal or Fermat, but I'm sure he'd rather be remembered as a good mathematician than as a shirt lifter. Besides, he has an elderly mother living in Leamington Spa. Even if I'd misjudged his willingness to ruin his own reputation in order to destroy mine, he wouldn't have risked exposing her to scandal. The old dear is a pillar of the parish, and of course she had no idea that her only son was a sodomite. No, I didn't think there was much risk of Black taking any action that would compromise his reputation, even after death. It came as the most awful shock when I found that suicide note and realised he must have talked to someone."

"How did you get the note?"

"I found it in his rooms," admitted Duffield. "I have a master key to all the College rooms, you know. I thought I'd better check that he hadn't left any incriminating documents lying around, so I slipped in there after the body had been taken away and all the hubbub had quietened down. The first thing I saw was that damned typewriter sitting on his desk with a note sticking out of it, bold as brass, telling me that it wasn't over yet by a long shot. The little tick took a massive risk there, assuming I'd search his room, because if I hadn't, the police would have found it the next morning and then there'd have been hell to pay. I suppose the blighter couldn't resist one parting shot. But how did you know it was me who'd filched the typewriter?"

"My exceptional insight into human nature," said Wimsey, who had no intention of divulging any details. "You do realise, Duffield, that you will have to face the consequences of your actions, just as you forced Black to face the consequences of his?"

"So I'm damned, am I?" said Sir John bitterly. "Damned by your exceptional insight into human nature and your exceptional arrogance in passing judgment on your fellow man. Curse you, Wimsey. If you're going to play judge and jury, why did you balk at executioner? You might have had the decency to wait half an hour before calling the ambulance."

"Frankly," said Wimsey, his expression as wintry as his voice, "I didn't think you deserved it." Then he bent his head over the hospital bed and talked very earnestly for almost quarter of an hour.

On returning to his rooms in College, Lord Peter found Bunter awake and eager to thrust tea upon him.

"Mr Kuryakin is asleep on the couch, my lord," he said. "He wished to be here when your lordship returned in order to learn what has become of Sir John, but I fear the waiting has proved soporific."

Lord Peter grinned. "I'll go and give him a kick," he said. "In the meantime, could you rustle up a cup of coffee to go with this tea? Our young friend is not the only one to feel the soporific effects of a prolonged wait." 

Suiting the action to the word, he went into the sitting room, where he found Kuryakin stretched out on the couch, oblivious to the world. The early morning sunlight, slanting through the window, turned his ruffled hair an improbable shade of gold. In sleep, his features had lost their wariness, and his face was open and vulnerable. He looked, as Henderson had said, about twelve. Lord Peter's heart was softened.

"Shame to wake the kid," he muttered. "He looks so peaceful. And so bloody young. It's hard to believe that when I was his age I was serving in the trenches. We were just kids ourselves, I suppose, though we took ourselves for men. Thank God this generation won't have to go through that particular horror." 

For a moment he stood still, ambushed by memories. Then he gave himself a violent shake and aimed a kick in the direction of the sleeper.

"Oi, Kuryakin, wake up!" he said heartily. "Don't you want to know what happened at the hospital?"

Peter could not have asked for a more appreciative audience. Kuryakin, startled into instant wakefulness, was openly agog, and Bunter hardly less so.

"It seems we were both right, Bunter," said his lordship, who knew a gripping opening line when he saw one. "It was suicide, and it was also murder." He proceeded to relate for his enthralled listeners the gist of his conversation with Duffield.

"What I still don't understand," said Kuryakin, when he had finished, "Is why Duffield stole Turing's work in the first place. He was a respected scholar in his own right. How can public honours matter more to a man than his own integrity?"

"Just for a handful of silver he left us, just for a riband to stick in his coat," agreed Peter. "The question honours you, Kuryakin, but I fear it is becoming a minority view. As Duffield himself once told me, these are godless days."

Kuryakin scowled. "Since he's still alive, does that mean he's going to press charges?" 

"Dear me, what a very gloomy imagination you do have," said Wimsey. "Quite the opposite. He will be issuing a statement to the press today informing them that, owing to his current state of ill-health, he has decided to withdraw from public life. Christ's will have to find a new Master. I hope they survive the in-fighting around the election; I understand there was a fair amount of blood on the carpet last time."

"And the Royal Society, my lord?" enquired Bunter.

"He's resigning his Fellowship. He isn't quite prepared to admit to them that he had committed an act of cold-blooded plagiarism, but he will say that he feels unable to accept the honour on the basis of what was essentially a collaborative work."

"But even if he resigns from everything, his reputation is still intact," said Kuryakin indignantly. 

"You want to see him publicly humiliated, I take it? Branded with a scarlet letter and led through the streets with a chain around his neck? We could do that to him, certainly, but I rather think that he, like Black, would prefer death before dishonour, even if the dishonour is thoroughly well deserved. And if Duffield were put into Black's position, well, then I should find myself in something very like Duffield's position, shouldn't I? And I'd rather avoid that."

"But it isn't fair!" protested Kuryakin.

"The young are so confoundedly unforgiving," said Lord Peter. "Go ahead, then, do what you think is right. Fire the killing shot. I shall not stay your hand."  
Kuryakin closed his fists in frustration. "He's getting away with it!" he said. "Just because we don't wish to descend to his level!"

"No," said Lord Peter thoughtfully, "I shouldn't say that he's getting off scot free, although he has certainly got off more lightly than he deserved. It's a nasty, sordid little tale all round, and Duffield very nearly pulled it off. In fact, he would have come out of the affair as pure as the driven snow, had it not been for your resemblance to the Elephant's Child."

"The Elephant's Child," put in Bunter helpfully, lest Kipling had not left his literary mark on Soviet Russia, "was known for his insatiable curiosity."

"Quite right," said Lord Peter. "And speaking of resemblances, that was a remarkable spot of acting you did last night, Kuryakin. Very quick thinking on your part. A complete caricature, of course - it wouldn't have fooled anyone in a more stable state of mind - but still remarkable."

Just for a moment, Bunter's eye met Kuryakin's.

"You're clearly a fellow of many talents," continued Wimsey, apparently oblivious to this silent exchange. "If you don't mind, I'd like to put you in touch with an old chum of mine, Alexander Waverly. A charming gent, and not at all frivolous; I think you'd get on like a house on fire. He's one of these weight-of-the-world types, quite different from Yours Truly. And now, let us venture forth and see if we can't catch the tail end of the Survivors' Breakfast. I am in a mood to outrage everyone with my callous indifference to mine host's brush with the Grim Reaper. Shall we shog?"


	14. EPILOGUE: THE CELLAR OF B STAIRCASE

"Excuse me, Mr Kuryakin? His Lordship has instructed me to say that he would be most obliged if you would consent to my taking your portrait; he likes to keep a record of the cases he has worked on. That's most kind of you. Would you be so good as to step this way, sir? The Bursar has very considerately placed a cellar room at my disposal, but do watch the steps as you go down, the third from the bottom is a little uneven..."

The speaker was Wimsey's – um, Wimsey's what? "Servant" was the correct word, Illya supposed, though it went against the grain to think of a living breathing human being in those terms. "Assistant" didn't quite catch the obsequious attitude the man assumed, and "friend" conspired in disguising the stark economic reality of their relationship. At any rate, he was Wimsey's man, and Illya suspected he would be putting him in a difficult situation if he refused, much as he disliked having his photograph taken.

The cellar at the bottom of B Staircase turned out to be a dingy little room with whitewashed brick walls, one end of which was set up as a miniature studio, with a large white screen and several impressive lamps, the other end containing a bench with the equipment needed for developing film. Evidently wealth and influence could penetrate even below the ground of this venerable institution, for space was at a premium in the little College, and the Bursar would certainly have had to move something out of there to make way for Wimsey's toys.

"If you would take a seat, sir? It will take me a few minutes to adjust the lighting. It's all a matter of light and shade, you see. The art of the portrait photograph lies not in directing light on what anyone can see, but in bringing hidden truths into plain view. I deduce from your discomfort that this is the first time you've had your portrait taken, sir?"

"Please don't call me 'sir'," Illya said.

For an almost imperceptible moment, the servant hesitated, then his brows drew together in a sort of twitch, over as soon as it had begun. "Certainly," he said coldly. "How would you prefer to be addressed, Comrade Kuryakin?"

"Mr Kuryakin will do, Mr Bunter."

"As you wish, Mr Kuryakin."

The man managed to make it sound as if he were accepting an order, an order which, moreover, he found personally distasteful, and thereby to place Illya in the ranks of the oppressors. It irritated Illya, and, as always when he felt wrong-footed, he became ungracious.

"How long have you been Wimsey's servant?" he asked, the question coming out a touch more aggressively than he had intended.

"I have been in his Lordship's personal employ since 1919," said Bunter, carefully setting the camera on a tripod and then lowering it. "Before that I was his batman during the Great War."

"Batman?" said Illya.

"A form of military manservant, who performs duties akin to those of a bedder," said Bunter, switching off all the lights but one, and turning that one on Illya, as if this was an interrogation. "I presume you are familiar with those, Mr Kuryakin? Or have your political principles rendered yours unemployed?" The question was phrased in the politest terms, but even a foreigner could not miss the underlying sarcasm. 

"I make my own bed," said Illya stiffly. 

"Very admirable, I'm sure," said Bunter. "As I mentioned, I was his lordship's batman and his regimental sergeant. I dug him out when a trench collapsed on him, which I can assure you was a far more difficult service than making his bed. Might I ask you to stand and turn a few inches to the left?"

Illya groped for the meaning behind Bunter's words. He was certain the man was trying to wrong-foot him again, but he was missing a link somewhere. Was Bunter suggesting that, as a Soviet, he, Illya, thought he should not have saved his commanding officer from the agony of suffocating in mud? Anger flared in him and he said "I know all about trenches, if that's what you're getting at. I spent three months digging them during the Battle of Moscow."

Again a minimal alteration in Bunter's features suggested an emotional response, but once again it was gone before Illya could read it properly. Bunter's expression was one of impeccable politeness as he said "Not that I am in any sense doubting your word, Mr Kuryakin, but surely you were rather young for such arduous labour?"

Illya glared. He generally avoided thinking of the war, because there was nothing about it that was pleasant to remember and a great deal that he should much prefer to forget, but this mocking doubt, from a lackey of the aristocracy, touched a vein of Russian pride in him; his country's honour was at stake. "I was nine," he said, lowering his eyes slightly to meet Bunter's probing gaze head on. The camera clicked, and he started, having completely forgotten that this was the object of their meeting.

"I'm sorry," said Bunter gently. "It was not my intent to malign the courage or suffering of the Soviet people. If I am honest with you, Mr Kuryakin, as you deserve, my intention was to provoke you, in the interests of obtaining a truthful portrait. Since I now have that, I suggest that we discontinue this conversation. I do not believe I will have to take another shot."

The light snapped off, and total darkness filled the cellar. For a moment Illya remained standing by his chair, furious at Bunter's confession. Once again he had been wrong-footed – how could he have fallen for such a cheap confidence trick? - but he had no intention of being beaten so easily. As the red light began to glow over the developing bench, he fired a return salvo.

"Since we are being honest with each, Mr Bunter," he said, "Can you tell me what brings a man to dedicate his whole life to the welfare of another person? Don't you have any pride?"

To his astonishment, Bunter positively smirked; it could not have been more unexpected if the man had winked at him. "I assume from this question," he said, "that you have as yet no experience of Love, Mr Kuryakin?"

Illya was completely taken aback. He knew what love was, of course – the catch in the throat, the flutter in the gut – but this was something quite different. Was it possible to love someone so much that you would give up everything to devote yourself to their service? A scandalous suspicion presented itself for his attention - he had heard, of course, of the love that dare not speak its name, that supposedly could exist between two men... But Wimsey was married and had children, had, indeed, a veritable superfluity of heirs, and Bunter had been the Terror of Piccadilly. Bunter must be speaking of platonic affection, which was admirable, and perhaps not dissimilar to the devotion he himself was required to bring to the Soviet state. Still, it was capitalist decadence to suggest that a single individual could be worthy of that kind of selfless love, although Bunter, as an oppressed member of the proletariat, could hardly be blamed for falling for this ideological trick.

The oppressed member of the proletariat was at that moment waving him over to the bench, apparently in order to demonstrate the process of photographic development. Feeling somewhat discomfited, Illya nevertheless joined him at the water tray. His unease gave way to scientific interest as he watched Bunter's capable fingers rock the blank sheet of paper gently back and forth, back and forth; and then the miracle happened.

Beneath the ripples in the water, dark shadows began to blossom against the white paper, like bruises forming under skin. There seemed to be no principle determining where the shadows would gather, for the paper darkened irregularly, the patches spreading out and joining up until it seemed as if the whole photograph would be nothing but blackness. Soon only two blotches of white remained, one near the centre and one down in the corner. Their purity sullied into pale grey and black spots began to fester within the pallor, but then the process halted, and as the shadows around them continued to deepen, the blotches seemed to grow paler in contrast. Illya watched, fascinated, as the boundaries between light and dark sharpened and acquired definition until suddenly, like a kaleidoscope, the pieces fell into place and he realised he was looking at the image of a face. His face, apparently, although it didn't look anything like him. Or at least it looked like him, but how he would look if he were someone else. His hair, which he had expected to be pale on the photograph, was one of the blackest parts of the picture, an extension of the darkness that surrounded him; and the darkness had entered his eyes, too, giving them inky depths in which secrets swam as numerous as fish. The patch of white at the bottom was his hand, raised as if to ward off an approach - whether in the form of a blow, or of unwanted intimacy, it was impossible to tell. It cast a shadow over what little was visible of his face, and indeed perhaps it was the light itself he was seeking to ward off, the light that had plucked him, a man of shadows, from the obscurity of the shadows, and exposed him to the gaze he was holding, half defiant, half provocative.

"I don't look like that," he said wonderingly.

For the first and only time since he had met him, Bunter smiled. "I assure you, you do, Mr Kuryakin," he said.

"I look like a spy," said Illya. "But I'm not a spy! I'm a scientist."

"If I might venture an observation," said Bunter, turning the lights back on, "I have been a gentleman's gentleman for over thirty years and in that time I have learned that, of all things, it is labels - and titles - that tell us least about a man. One would not think, would one, that an English aristocrat and a Russian Communist could have much in common? But I can assure you that I have never met a man who reminds me more of his Lordship in his younger days. If you will forgive the impertinence, Mr Kuryakin, the British class system is hardly an opponent worthy of your talents, but I am certain that one day you will find one that is. And now if you will excuse me, sir, I must tidy up here. Please take care on your way out, the third step from the bottom is a little uneven..."

As Illya disappeared around the bend in the staircase, he thought he heard Bunter murmuring to himself while he cleared away the chemicals. "A tough nut indeed... Where did I put the fixer?... Couldn't be more like Peter if they were two peas in a pod... Never want to let you see beneath the mask... Tsk, this bulb will need replacing... Dear me, who'd have thought that that was what the Bolsheviks were breeding?"

 

FINIS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. For the curious, Bunter's portrait of Illya can be found at:  
> http://www.davidmccallumfansonline.com/mystery.jpg
> 
> 2\. I owe a greater debt of gratitude to nineveh-uk than I can ever to express. She showed devotion above and beyond the call of duty in performing close reading on this monster, thereby saving me from some absolute howlers; and without her incomparable ear for the nuances of the English language, especially as spoken by Lord Peter and Bunter, and her inexhaustible knowledge of the Wimsey canon, the story would have been very much poorer. 
> 
> 3\. Lord Peter Wimsey and Bunter are, of course, the invention of Dorothy L. Sayers. I hope she will forgive the pale imitations that wander through these pages.
> 
> 4\. Illya Kuryakin is a character from a 1960s TV series, The Man from UNCLE.
> 
> 5\. I have taken some liberties with history and architecture. To the best of my knowledge, Christ's College does not possess Milton's duelling pistols (if, indeed, "the Lady of Christ's" ever owned such things), and although Lady Margaret Beaufort's oratory window does indeed look down on the Chapel, I am not at all sure that it would be possible to climb up through it. Alan Turing's papers were not stored in a cupboard in the Cavendish Laboratory after his death, and of course he did not know any of the entirely fictional characters with which this story is populated.


End file.
